Monster (24 page)

Nothing happened. Not even the failed connection notice that normally came.

Some kind of nullifying counterspell was interfering. Monster had expected as much. There was no way for Chester to get back into his paper form. Monster was on his own. And if there was a spell keeping Chester at bay, there was also probably another that would bite him on the ass if he tried to escape.

The guest room had a small bathroom with an even smaller shower. But it got the job done. It didn’t clean his clothes, though his boxer shorts were relatively slime-free. He lay on the bed in his underwear and tried to come up with a plan that had the least chance of backfiring.

The door opened. Monster didn’t even try to make a break for it. He just assumed such an attempt was doomed to failure.

Lotus carried a sterling silver serving tray in her hands and some clothes under her arm.

“Hello, hello,” she said. “I thought you might be hungry, so I brought you something to eat.” She set it on the end table beside the bed. “And a change of clothes. Thought you might need that too.”

She laid the clothes, in neatly folded squares, at his feet. The pants were plaid, and the shirt was striped. The socks were black. Monster held them out at a distance, afraid that if he allowed them to get too close he might spontaneously transform into a grandpa with his pants up to his chest.

She carried something else too under her arm. A flat piece of slate. He noticed some writing on it. Like runes, but unlike any he’d ever seen. Or any he could remember, at any rate. It was hard to pin down without his dictionary.

He didn’t bother sitting up, just lay there in his boxers. He turned his head enough to see the food she’d brought: a peanut butter sandwich (the crusts were cut off), some oatmeal cookies, and a beer. He wasn’t very hungry, but the beer looked good.

It might as well have had a label on it saying
Perfectly harmless!

“Now let’s see here,” said Lotus as she stared intently at her stone slab. “Judy tells me your name is Monster. Monster Dionysus. Is that correct?”

He grunted.

“Is Monster your given name?” she asked. “Or is it, as I presume, a nickname?”

He grunted again.

Her lips puckered into a slight frown. “I can understand your resentment, young man. I truly can. But this will be a lot easier if you drop the attitude.”

He looked her in the eye. He grunted but he did so with a smile this time.

“As you wish,” she said. “It’s no bother to me. You’re only making it harder on yourself. In any case, your nickname should work just fine. Whatever you’re known best as is usually the easiest cross-referencing tool.”

She hummed to herself while running her fingers along the stone. He didn’t know what she was doing, but she wasn’t paying attention to him. He could’ve jumped up and kicked her in the head before she knew it. Except he still had that painful reminder that Lotus was under some kind of protection. She wasn’t worried about him because there was nothing to be worried about.

She shook her head and clicked her tongue. “This is most puzzling. For some reason, you don’t seem to exist.”

Monster wasn’t interested in arguing with her, but he figured he was too annoyed to be imaginary.

“Most troublesome indeed,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve come across a flaw in the stone’s records. In fact, I’m fairly certain I never have.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about, and he didn’t care.

“Lady, I don’t know what you’re doing here, and I really don’t want to know. If you let me go, I promise to keep my mouth shut, go home, and never think about any of this again.”

Lotus shrugged. “I wish I could trust you. I really do. But everything is in far too delicate a state at the moment. I think it was twenty thousand years ago, give or take, that I decided the little details weren’t worth bothering with. Ended up being thrown in a volcano for my sloppiness. Let me tell you, Mr. Dionysus, there’s nothing like having to claw and scrape your way through a sea of molten lava to remind one to keep an eye on the details.”

Monster tried to figure out if she was being serious. If she was making a joke, she was very good at keeping a straight face.

“Are you a goddess or something?” he asked.

She chuckled. “Oh, heavens no. Since when do gods bother with mortal affairs? They gave up on this universe a long time ago, once they realized its affections weren’t anything worth fighting over. No, I’m just the keeper of the stone, doing what I must to maintain order.”

She held the slab toward him and waved it around a bit. Then smacked it several times, held it to her ear and shook it.

“Most puzzling, indeed,” she remarked as she left the room, locking the door behind her.

Monster decided Lotus was a nut. A nut with some powerful magic at her disposal, but a nut nonetheless. That only worried him more.

Judy glanced up with glazed eyes as Lotus entered the kitchen. “Hello.”

“Hello.” Lotus set the stone at its place by the kitchen sink. “How are you feeling, dear?”

“Peachy,” said Judy, and she meant it. “This tea is great! It’s really, really great!” She took a long drink and poured herself another. “I mean, wow! You should bottle this stuff and sell it. You’d make a fortune.”

“Thank you. You’re too kind.”

Lotus joined Judy at the table and had a cup herself. The pacifying effects of the tea wouldn’t affect her in the same way they did Judy, who even now had the mental capacity of a week-old turnip.

“Tell me something, Judy. What’s the nature of your relationship with Monster?”

Judy twisted her face in a childish scowl. “He’s a dummy. And he’s mean.”

“You don’t like him, then?”

Judy pretended to stick her finger down her throat and made a retching sound. Then she giggled.

Lotus asked the stone, “That man is the anomaly, the thing you kept hiding from me? One little human? You realize how easily I could kill him right now.”

She caressed the stone, and it shuddered.

“Oh, fine, play your game, then,” said Lotus. “We’ve done this a thousand times before, and it always turns out the same. But perhaps this variable will spice things up a bit.”

“What’s that?” asked Judy.

“Nothing, dear. If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to take care of.”

Judy was too busy staring at her own hand to realize Lotus had left until four minutes after the fact.

Judy continued to drink the tea. Each cup tasted more wonderful than the last, and everything seemed so much more amusing. She spent twenty minutes contemplating a red dot on the tablecloth, wondering if it was part of the pattern or a stain. She failed to notice anything else, including the small furry beast that slipped through the kitchen cat door.

At a casual glance, it could easily be mistaken for another cat. A little plumper than usual, missing a tail. The ears were larger, too. And, if someone noticed the rest of the details, they might also notice that the creature had more of a fox’s face and that it stood upright, though it had a tendency to steady itself with its knuckles when it walked. But nobody really would’ve noticed because nobody was supposed to notice. It was just one more feline in a house crawling with them.

The creature hopped onto the table, finally drawing Judy’s attention.

“Hello,” said Judy, bobbing her head with each exaggerated syllable. “Hello, hello, hello.”

The creature squeaked like a monkey as it pushed the teapot off the table.

“That’s not very nice!”

Screeching, it kicked her cup away, sending it shattering onto the floor.

Pendragon and the cats all raised their heads at this strange intruder, but by then it had darted out of the room with incredible swiftness, a fuzzy red blur.

The fox-faced creature slipped into the living room, where Ferdinand was occupying herself with a crossword puzzle while Ed read a copy of
Animal Farm.

Ferdinand set down her pen and stared at the puzzle. She wasn’t very good at them, but there wasn’t much else to do at Mrs. Lotus’s.

“What’s a five-letter word for ‘a skeleton component’?” she finally asked Ed.

“White,” suggested Ed.

“That’s a color, not a component.”

Ed turned a page in her book. “Calcium?” she said absently.

Ferdinand performed a quick calculation. “That’s seven letters.”

“Is it?” said Ed.

Ferdinand grumbled. She didn’t know why she’d asked. Ed was never any help with crossword puzzles. Secretly, she wished Mrs. Lotus would buy a television, but Lotus was quite adamant against the notion. This didn’t leave Ferdinand many choices. She couldn’t just keep reading and rereading the same book over and over again like Ed.

Ferdinand reached for her pen. It was gone. A glance around the floor turned up nothing. She stood and hefted the recliner over her head.

“What’s wrong?” asked Ed.

“Lost my pen,” said Ferdinand.

“There are more pens in the kitchen. A whole drawer full of them.”

“It was my lucky pen.”

“Since when did you have a lucky pen?” asked Ed. “Since now.” Ferdinand dropped the chair and snorted. “I’ve got a third of this puzzle filled out, and that means that the pen must be lucky.”

“Mrs. Lotus says we make our own luck.”

“Mrs. Lotus says a lot of things.” Ferdinand blew a bubble and sucked it back in.

“Can’t you just find a new lucky pen, then?” asked Ed.

Ferdinand spat a wad of gum into the trash basket beside her and crammed several fresher pieces into her cheek. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just find lucky pens. It’s not like you can go to the lucky pen store and buy them by the handful.”

“I bet Mrs. Lotus could make you one if you asked her,” suggested Ed. “She knows how to do that sort of thing.”

“I don’t want a magic pen.”

Ed lowered her book just enough to peer over its cover. “What’s the difference?”

“Anybody can have a magic pen,” said Ferdinand. “Lucky pens are a lot rarer.”

Ed thought about this a moment. She didn’t see the logic, but then again, she rarely did. Ed wasn’t a logical sort. She made up for it with a sunny disposition.

“I know,” she said. “We could go into the kitchen and try out all the other pens. I’m sure one of them will be lucky.”

Ferdinand found the idea absurd, but she was intrigued.

“How would we find that out?”

“I could think of a number between one and ten,” Ed proposed. “One pen at a time, you’ll write a number, and the first pen that gets it right must be the lucky one.”

Ferdinand nodded. “That’s not such a bad idea.”

“Goody!” Ed jumped up, throwing her book to the side. “This will be fun! I think I’ll go with nine. That’s a good number.”

“You can’t tell me what it is beforehand,” said Ferdinand.

“Sorry. Okay, so it won’t be nine, then. For sure out of all the numbers it could be, it’s not nine. Definitely not.”

“It’s nine, isn’t it?”

“Wow, that’s good,” said Ed as she followed Ferdinand into the kitchen. “Are you sure you need a lucky pen?”

Meanwhile, the fox-faced creature, Ferdinand’s lucky pen firmly in hand, slipped from its hiding place under the couch and darted up the stairs. It was naturally sneaky, so it didn’t make a sound. Not that it had to contend with any sentries. Only cats, and they were all too busy with their own concerns (mostly napping and cleaning themselves) to care about one more furry beast roaming the house’s halls.

The creature sniffed its way toward its target, guided by its keen sense of smell. One door caught its attention, and a few moments with its nose pressed under the doorjamb confirmed it had found who it was looking for. With one jump, it latched on to the handle. It set its feet apart and twisted its entire body to turn the knob. The protective spell only kept the door locked from the other side, so it opened. The creature jumped off the door, and it slowly began to swing shut again.

Monster was in the middle of putting on his new pants. He jumped toward the door, tripping on the loose pant leg. He still might’ve made it except that the fox-faced beast dashed under his feet. Monster fell just short, and the door closed with a click.

“Son of a bitch.” He turned over on his back and stared at the ceiling, wearing an unbuttoned shirt that was a size too small and trousers only halfway on.

The imp climbed onto his chest and, yipping, held out Ferdinand’s lucky pen.

“Thanks.” Monster took the pen. “This is just what I needed.”

The imp wagged its stubby tail and licked him twice on the chin. It hopped onto the nightstand and tipped the tray, sending the meal flying through the air to land on the bed.

“You didn’t have to do that,” said Monster. “I wasn’t going to eat it.”

The creature yipped before making absolutely sure of that by stomping on the sandwich and urinating on the cookies.

Monster sat on the corner of the bed that wasn’t soaked with beer or imp piss. The creature, having apparently accomplished its mission, lost all interest in Monster. It amused itself by tearing up the pillow.