The Monster Hunter's Manual (3 page)

My mom used to drag us through Paris and she never got tired. She would pull us through the underworld of the subways, where the trains never slept and had complained as she walked, “Sometimes there's just too much to see.” She had then smiled and winked at me and leaned down and whispered in my ear, “This place is magic you know.”

“The subway?” I had asked.

“Yes,” she had said. “These tunnels go on forever and deep beneath the earth there are magic creatures that live forever.”

I remember being a little scared then. “Are they bad?”

“No,” my mother had answered. “They saved your father once.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She had said it in the way she said lots of things. I had never been sure if she was just telling a story or if she really meant it.

I thought about it as I started out into the castle. There was too much to see. Alex ran ahead of me. “Come on,” he shouted.

I followed him up the first tower of the broken castle. The old wooden door whined as it opened, and Alex ran up the long, spiral stairs, to the top of the tower. From the top, you could see the entire village and the countryside beyond it.

Alex laughed. “I bet knights used to stand guard up here and shoot people with their arrows. Don't you think?”

“It was probably just a watchtower,” I answered.

“You are such a killjoy, sometimes.” He ran down the
stairs and up to the top of the castle gate. There were two towers on either side of it The towers had tiny slit windows. The area just on top of the gate had slit windows too. Alex smiled. “Archers could stand here and fire out on the people who were attacking them!” He pretended to draw his bow and fire out onto the imaginary armies beneath us.

I looked out of the hole at the village and tried to imagine what it must have been like. I tried to imagine armies of knights in shining armor moving up the hill towards us with swords drawn.

“This is awesome!” Alex declared. He ran to the next tower. “Why didn't we come here before?”

“Dad and Aunt Perrine didn't get along,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don't know. They had some kind of fight when we were both little. Mom always wanted them to work it out, but Dad wouldn't. Mom always tried to talk to Aunt Perrine, but Dad got so upset she just let it go.”

“What did they fight about?”

“I don't know. You'd have to ask Aunt Perrine.”

“No way! She's crazy,” he said.

I joined Alex and pretended to draw my bow and fire at the oncoming hoards of knights. Alex drew his sword and faced me. “You won't take this castle.”

“Your pitiful army won't stop us,” I replied and we pretended to fight along the castle walls. We clashed invisible swords for a while and then we ran down the stairs and back out into the courtyard. The sun spilled over the half-broken walls and onto the sweet, summer grass, and we ran in and out of broken remains of what was once some kind of barn. We jumped on the walls fighting all the way and then ran into the remains of the castle keep. An old door led to more stairs, which in turn led to a small
room by a window. The small room was all that was left of the keep. The rest of it had crumbled.

We stood in the room and looked at the broken timbers from the roof and the remains of moldy tapestries. Alex kicked the beams and looked around.

I thought the room must have been beautiful once. There was an old bed with large, claw feet. There were cherubs carved on the headboard and bed curtains still hung in tattered disrepair from the canopy. There was a broken mirror and an old chest. There were elaborate chairs engraved with angels and saints. Dull light streamed in from one small, barred window, making the dust in the room seem even thicker. All of this beauty sat as if it hadn't been touched for a thousand years.

“I bet this is where they kept the prisoners,” he said.

“I don't think so.”

“This is the prison,” he asserted.

“Why would they have tapestries in a prison?”

“I don't know,” Alex said. “Why would they have bars on the windows if it wasn't a prison?”

“Maybe to keep people out?”

“I think it's a prison,” Alex said again.

He picked up an old piece of wood and pretended it was a sword. He parried and thrust and I watched him. Something moved in the shadows, behind one of the old tapestries. The tapestry fluttered and I moved it aside. There was nothing but stone wall behind it.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“What?” Something else moved, this time by the edge of a broken bed. It moved behind the bed curtains. The bed curtains were ruined and faded. Time had decayed them, but I could see that they had once been beautiful red velvet, and had been embroidered with tiny flowers.

“This was a bedroom,” I whispered to myself.

“It was the room of the Lord's daughter,” a small voice answered from the shadows.

Both Alex and I turned. We could see someone hiding behind the remains of a tapestry, but we couldn't see who.

“She was a princess…” The voice was a whisper.

Alex moved towards me and stood slightly behind me with his fake sword drawn.

“What was that?” he whispered in my ear.

I stepped away from him and moved towards the tapestry. “Who are you?” I demanded. “And what are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” the small voice responded. It was a girl's voice.

“We live here,” I answered.

The girl stepped out of the corner. I could see her. She was pretty and pale. She seemed almost like an angel in the shadows and was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, like a picture from a fairytale. I couldn't see her very well, but she had long blond hair and blue eyes. She wore a long dress that dragged against the dirty floor when she moved. There were jewels braided into her hair. She was probably no more than twelve, but something in the way she stood gave her authority.

“I live here too,” she said.

“Really?” Alex asked.

She nodded and stepped into the sunlight. The girl was pale – so pale the sun passed right through her. I think I should have been afraid. Alex jumped a little, but she was so pretty and sweet that there was no way I could be afraid.

“You're a ghost,” I said plainly.

“Yes.”

“Did you used to live here?”

“I still do,” she said.

“I mean, when you were alive?”

“Oh it doesn't matter that I live here because I'm a ghost?” she said.

I could feel myself flushing. I hadn't meant to offend her and my words seemed to be coming out all wrong. “No, that's not what I meant.”

She shook her head in disagreement. “Well, that's what you said. This is my room. It's always been my room.”

“Well,” Alex said. “It's gross and dirty.”

“That's because you lack the vision to see it as it really
is,” she said.

“I can see fine.”

“How does it really look?” I asked.

The girl stepped forward and smiled at me. “Do you want me to show you?”

I nodded. I could hardly breathe. This was like magic. Like real magic. We were in a magic castle!

“Don't let her do it!” Alex yelled. “She'll suck your brains out or something.”

“Shut up,” I said.

The girl reached out and passed her hand through me. It tingled. I closed my eyes. “You have the gift,” she whispered softly.

I opened my eyes and I saw the room as it had once been. I saw a large bed, like a princess's, hung with beautiful fabric. There was a large fireplace in the corner and the walls were covered in tapestries. These were bright and new, showing pictures of unicorns and princesses sitting in tents.

Beneath the tapestries, three pretty young girls sat doing embroidery, little dogs at their feet. The girls talked and laughed as they worked.

I looked out the window and saw the castle. The walls were high and flags decorated with red lions, waved in the wind. The courtyard was crowded with peasants working. There was a man in the corner working in a small enclave. He seemed to be a blacksmith working his craft. Another man was saddling horses and there were a group of women carrying heavy baskets somewhere. Children ran through the courtyard laughing and two men practiced fighting with wooden swords. An older man sat on a stool cleaning something. Everyone was busy.

Just behind the courtyard, the keep stood like it had just been built. The keep was a beautiful home for the lord of
the land. Knights practiced their sword fighting on the mound just beyond the castle keep. The sound of their clashing swords rose above the other sounds in the courtyard.

A young boy saddled a horse by the barn and a pair of pretty maidens walked through the castle gates. The church doors were thrown open, and as the bells sounded, people stopped their work and began to walk towards them.

I smiled and the image faded, like a movie fading out. I turned around and everything was as it had been. “It's beautiful,” I said.

“I know,” she replied.

“I'm Gabriel.”

“I'm Eleanor,” she said in a crisp, British accent.

“Why don't you speak French?”

“When I lived here,” she said. “The English held this part of France. The Great Queen Eleanor, after whom I am named, and Henry II the Plantagenet, ruled all of England and most of France.”

I smiled at her. “I didn't know that.”

“When the French came and took this castle, it fell and no one bothered to fix it. Your aunt's the only one who's lived here since then.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“You've been here all alone?”

She laughed. “No silly. This place is filled with friends. Why would I stay alone?”

“What friends?”

“Would you like to meet them?” Her grin was mischievous.

“Yes!”

“Don't tell your Aunt Perrine, OK?”

“Of course not.”

“Can I come too?” Alex asked from the corner.

Eleanor gave him a mean glare and then smiled and nodded. “I haven't had any other children to play with in forever,” she said. She turned and led us out of the keep.

Eleanor almost vanished as she stepped into the courtyard. The sun made her nothing but a whisper of light and we had to squint to see her. She ran and we had to go as fast as we could to keep up with her. We could hear her laughter as she passed under the castle gates and out into the driveway. She took us down a sharp path behind the castle to a cave, which went under the castle. There were bars in front of it, but she raised them so we could pass under. In the darkness of the cave, I could see Eleanor more clearly than ever. She glowed in the dark. I could see her long golden hair tied back in a braid and her long, velvet gown tied at the waist with a jeweled belt.

She was so bright we could see the cave, even in the dark. And it wasn't a cave, it was a tunnel. It was hundreds of tunnels built beneath the castle out of stone. Eleanor laughed and led us into the darkness until we were so far underground we couldn't have found our way out if we tried.

“I don't like this,” Alex whined.

I took his hand and smiled at him. “It's going to be OK. This is magic. Just like Mom used to say. Don't you remember?”

“No,” he said.

“She used to say that there was magic in all these old places, if we had eyes to see them. She said that there were adventures in every shadow and we should never turn away from an adventure.”

“She said that?”

I nodded and Alex smiled. His grip tightened in my
hand and we pushed on, following our phantom friend to a large room filled with an underground garden. It didn't even seem real it was so beautiful. A waterfall poured out of what appeared to be an underground portion of the castle and there were flowers everywhere. I watched Eleanor. She was the prettiest thing in the room and her radiance illuminated everything, bathing it in a warm glow.

She smiled and made a strange cooing sound and two dozen gleaming eyes appeared around us in the darkness.

Eleanor said something in French and more than a dozen, strange fuzzy creatures lumbered out from the shadows. Alex's hand tightened in mine. The creatures were small and walked upright, but hunched over. They had long pointy noses and beady little eyes. They wore old tunics and strange gilded armor. The tiny creatures came out of the shadows and studied us.

Eleanor spoke to them in French. “These are my friends,” she said. “They are the Molemen. They've been here as long as me, even longer. They play wonderful games and music.”

One of the Molemen spoke to her and she nodded. “They want to know if you will be working with your Aunt Perrine – The Lady Perrine?” Eleanor asked.

I had no idea what they were talking about so I answered as best I could. “We'll help her as much as we can,” I said.

A loud cheer rang out in the hall and then suddenly it filled with Molemen and Molewomen carrying instruments, tables, and food.