Nightmares of Weirdwood--A William Shivering Tale, page 15
“You’re right, Audrey!” Arthur said, still flipping pages. “I do hatch schemes that get us into trouble! In fact, it was my actions that got us into this terrible situation when I retired the Gentleman Thief!”
“Now isn’t the time for character growth, Arthur,” Audrey said.
But nothing would wipe the grin from his face. He found the page he was looking for, bookmarked it with his finger, and beamed.
“Back in the Great Elsewhere, when I gazed into the Eraser’s nothingness, I saw a flash of Garnett’s golden eyes and a swoop of his signature hat. I shouldn’t have been able to see that. Amelia said when I retired the Gentleman Thief, it eliminated all traces of him in the Fae or the Real. And yet, for just a moment, I saw him.” He opened the book toward Breeth and Audrey, pointing to the Gentleman Thief’s name in ink. “See? The Gentleman Thief still exists in this book! After I retired Garnett with the dragon-bone Quill, our first experience in the Manor was no longer the latest Gentleman Thief adventure … it was the first. But it doesn’t have to be! We can step into these pages and make it so the Eraser was never created!”
Breeth leaned in to Audrey. “Are you getting any of this?”
“I believe he’s talking about time travel,” Audrey said.
“Mm,” Arthur said, rocking his head side to side in disagreement. “More like editing a story.”
Audrey crossed her arms and scowled her whiskers. “You’ve read time travel stories, right? Going into the past to try to stop something from happening never turns out how the characters want it to. In fact, it tends to do the opposite.”
“Good thing it’s not time travel,” Arthur said without a dip in confidence. “Like I said, we’re just editing a story. We’ll eliminate the Eraser from the present by…”
“Aha!” Audrey said.
Arthur winced. “I meant from later in the story. Do you have a better idea?”
“Y’know,” Audrey said, turning out her apron pockets. “I plum forgot to pack one.”
Arthur nodded down into the nothingness. “All we have to do is get this copy of Thieves of Weirdwood to the mirror in the Abyssment, step inside the story, and stop me from retiring Garnett Lacroix. I’ve cleaned up my mistakes before. But now we’re going to fix my fixing of a mistake. We’re going to erase the Eraser!”
Audrey raised a paw. “What if something goes wrong like it has literally every other time?”
Arthur steepled his fingers. “If for some reason we can’t solve the problem—which we totally will, don’t worry—then Cooper’s story self will transform the whole hospital into marshmallow with the dragon-bone Quill. We’ll have ourselves a little tumble and a soft, sugary landing before returning home through the Manor on the ground.”
“The fall is fun!” Breeth said. “Once you realize your best friend isn’t going to die.”
Arthur went to the hall’s edge and peered over. “Now, how do we get all the way down to the Abyssment?”
“I’m no scientist,” Audrey said. “But would jumping work?”
Breeth and Arthur both gave her a look.
Audrey rolled her eyes. “Not to our deaths. I mean, jumping up and down in this broken piece of hallway to make it sink.”
Arthur made an experimental small hop, and sure enough, the hallway sank a few inches.
“Perfect!” Arthur said. “We can use our weight to sail the hall down there! Steering might be a bit tricky…”
“If only you had a ghost girl around,” Breeth said with a smirk.
She stretched her being through the floors, walls, and ceiling, and straining, angled the bit of hallway toward the Abyssment stairs. Audrey and Arthur took turns jumping and shifting their weight, gathering at one end or throwing their shoulders into a wall to help Breeth steer. The hall sank through the nothingness before touching down before the Abyssment stairs, miraculously still intact.
Audrey and Arthur helped KW and Wally to their feet, and they all descended to the mirror, connected by electric wires to a wooden stand. Arthur set the copy of Thieves of Weirdwood on the stand and flipped through the pages. The text of their first adventure flickered past while adjoining sensations poured from the mirror itself. The animal scents of Mirror Kingsport wafted through. Breezes and Corvidian feathers gusted across the floor. A tentacle whipped through and nearly snagged Audrey by the neck.
“Watch it!” she yelled.
“Sorry,” Arthur said, quickly turning the page and severing the tentacle. “Not here … Not here … We can’t save Valerie Lucas, otherwise we’ll have to battle that tentacle monster…” He reached the book’s ending and stopped flipping. “Here. We’ll go in here.”
Breeth gazed through the mirror, down a spooky, gray hallway, which bobbed up and down. The monster hospital. Its bat wings flapped strangely through the sky.
“Breeth?” Arthur said. “Can you can possess Alfred Moore to relieve him of the dragon-bone Quill?”
Breeth turned to Wally, who hadn’t even looked up from his feet.
“Don’t worry,” Arthur told her. “You’ll only possess him for a brief time, and the mad author’s been hurting people, so it’s morally sound.”
Breeth thought a moment, then nodded.
Audrey worried her paws. “How will we get back home?”
“Once we get the dragon-bone Quill, we can write portals to wherever we want!” Arthur said. “We’ll come back here, the Manor will be back to its old creaky self, and we’ll all laugh about it over pumpkin soup in the feasting hall. Audrey, we’ll get you back to the DappleWood, and then the rest of us will sit down and solve the whole Veil disagreement like civilized folks.”
Everyone was quiet. But it was a hopeful kind of quiet. Tears still shone on Wally’s and KW’s cheeks.
The ferret helped the little girl make a giant step over the mirror’s frame, then offered her paw to Arthur. They both stepped into the monster hospital, whose grayness seemed to leach the color from their clothes.
“So, Cooper,” Arthur said from the other side of the mirror. “Ready for one last adventure?”
Wally finally looked up at his friend. “I’m sorry, Arthur. We agree on what needs to happen. We just don’t agree on how.”
Arthur’s smile melted as Wally reached toward the stand and shut the copy of Thieves of Weirdwood.
“No!” Arthur said.
His hand darted out just as the mirror flickered like static and then vanished in a flash of silver.
16
RETURN TO THIEVES OF WEIRDWOOD
The last time Arthur had been in the monster hospital, he had been terrified for his life. Now he was furious.
“Calls himself my friend,” he said, pacing the stone hallway. “Where does he think he’s going to go anyway? The Manor’s been erased! It’s not like he can sail it anywhere!”
He was so caught up in his anger with Wally, he barely noticed that KW had collapsed in a corner and covered her face.
Audrey crouched and gave the girl’s little knee a squeeze. “Don’t let this drafty old hospital scare you. In your old age, you’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen. I once watched you duel a dragon and win.”
KW peeked through her fingers with her constellation eyes. “I gotta fight a dragon?”
Audrey shook her head. “That is not what I meant. Your dragon-fighting days are far behind you. Er … ahead of you.”
KW quickly covered her face again.
With a grunt, Audrey stood and peered through a narrow stone window at the great flapping wings and the thousand-foot drop. She poked a claw into Arthur’s side. “Why are you always bringing us to places in the sky?” She whisper-hissed to keep KW from hearing. “You told us we’d be safe, Arthur!”
Arthur didn’t stop pacing. “Why don’t you ask Cooper why he didn’t send Breeth with us! She’s the one that keeps us from dying more often than not!”
Audrey gritted her fangs and flexed her claws. “I need somethin’ to keep my paws occupied, otherwise I am going to scratch your face to ribbons.” She looked at KW’s drooping wedding dress and clicked her tongue. “This will not do for adventures. Highly impractical.”
She took a pair of scissors from her apron and began trimming the dress’s hem.
“You know what?” Arthur stopped pacing and faced the gray stone hallway. “If Wally doesn’t want to be the hero, I’ll do it alone. Won’t he be embarrassed when I’m praised by everyone for vanquishing the Eraser and saving the world?”
Arthur caught his breath and finally allowed the surroundings to seep into his senses. The monster hospital looked the same as it had last time. Dark and undulating with the occasional whoosh of cold wind blasting down the hallway. Only … something felt different. The hall seemed grayer than he remembered. The wind felt stiffer. Sure, the place was named Greyridge, and it had transformed into a screeching bat-winged monster. But had it really been this bleak?
Arthur blinked through the low light at Audrey, still trimming KW’s dress so it landed above the child’s ankle. He noticed that the ferret’s black and brown fur was now gray and darker gray. KW’s eyes were as colorless as the stars seen through the narrow window. The blue was gone.
“Is it just me,” Arthur said, “or is there no color?”
Audrey looked down at her light gray dress and made a frustrated sound. “This had better not be ruined. It belonged to my grandmother!” She tried swiping the gray away, saw the gray fur on her paw, and gasped. “I got this fur from her as well!”
KW held up her colorless hand and, frowning, gave it a shake, as if trying to make the color come back.
Arthur studied his own gray hand, wondering what it could possibly mean. “Maybe this is just the way story pocket-worlds look. They’re made of white pages and black ink, after all. I’m sure we’ll return to normal once we complete this second draft and give it a better ending.”
He strode down the hallway while Audrey led a whimpering KW behind. “Come on, sugar. Let’s go find out where our colors went.”
“This will be easy,” Arthur tried to reassure them. “All we need to do is stop Wally and myself from approaching Alfred Moore and using the dragon-bone Quill to retire Garnett.” He cleared his throat. “And find another way to talk Moore out of writing monsters into Kingsport.”
“You sure we can do all that?” Audrey asked.
“Of course we can!” Arthur said. “Of course I’m sure!” He grinned back at her, trying to forget the horrors that lay ahead—the flaming eyeballs, were-gators, sewage snails, and, most challenging of all, convincing Moore to retire without his beloved Gentleman Thief. “If we can just reach the second floor of this monster hospital, this story will take care of its—”
Vvt! Vvt! Vvvvvvvvvt!
A sharp drilling sound echoed through the hospital. Arthur, Audrey, and KW peered around the next corner and found Wally and the tentacle monster battling the mad hospital’s questionable cures. A swarm of electric drills jabbed at their heads, trying to put holes in them, while a flock of straitjackets clamped themselves around Wally’s limbs and the monster’s tentacles.
Arthur blinked. The scene was in color. Green metal and slimy purple tentacles.
KW whimpered and Audrey quickly covered her eyes with a paw. “It’s just a show, sweetie. Like a play.” She looked to Arthur and whispered, “You need to save Wally before he gets drilled to bits!”
“Watch,” Arthur whispered, confident in his friend.
He hadn’t been in the hospital for this fight, but he had found Wally in one piece once he arrived. Sure enough, Wally and the tentacle monster worked together to banish the hospital’s questionable cures.
“Nice, Cooper,” Arthur whispered.
Audrey’s muzzle wrinkled. “Why’s Wally helping that giant squid?”
“That’s Breeth,” Arthur said.
Audrey shook her head. “I do not know how y’all keep track of this.”
Wally and the tentacle monster continued down the hallway toward them. With each step their color spread through the hall like watercolor paint, shimmering the yellow moss between the blue stone cracks. Behind them, the darkness fell back to gray.
“I think I get it,” Arthur whispered. He nodded to Wally in the hallway of color. “That’s the story. Where the adventure happened.” He gestured to the gray hallway he, Audrey, and KW were crouching in. “We’re not in the story. We’re off the page. That’s why we’re all gray.”
Audrey covered KW’s ears. “Why do I get the feeling we’re about to get a lot more colorful?”
Arthur nodded. “Let me talk to Wally. He’ll be shocked enough seeing me here. Let alone a ferret and a little Lady Weirdwood.”
He straightened his collar, reminded himself that this was not the Wally who would abandon him in a maniacal hospital (not yet, anyway), and stepped into the hall, right in front of his friend.
“Don’t freak out, Cooper,” he said, hands raised. “I know I’m supposed to be way back on the ground controlling Garnett, but, boy, do I have a crazy story to tell you.”
Wally didn’t even look at him. His eyes swept back and forth, passing over Arthur like he was just another shadow as they searched for the hospital’s next danger.
“Cooper?” Arthur said, waving his hands in front of Wally’s face. “Hey! Cooper!”
Wally didn’t slow down. His chest struck Arthur’s—“Oof!”—moving Arthur backward down the hall. Arthur stepped to the side and caught Wally by the wrist, trying to stop him. But Wally’s arm continued to swing forward like a mallet made of concrete, ripping itself out of Arthur’s hands.
Arthur quickly stepped ahead of Wally and pushed against his chest. “Rrrr!”
It didn’t slow him an inch. Wally was as firm as a walking statue.
“Help me!” Arthur called.
Audrey took KW’s hand in her paw. “Think you can help me stop that guy from walking?”
The little girl shook her head vehemently, eyes locked on the tentacle monster still slithering down the hall.
“Audrey, please!” Arthur shouted, straining.
Audrey huffed and scooped up KW, who immediately buried her face in the ferret’s fuzzy shoulder.
“Remember, sugar,” Audrey said. “It’s all a play and can’t hurt you … I hope.”
She was just able to step in front of Breeth before her tentacles blocked the hall. She took hold of Wally’s arm with her free paw and pulled back as hard as she could, skidding her paws as Arthur pressed from the other side, desperately trying to slow him down. When Wally’s shirt didn’t so much as ruffle, they gave up, exhausted, and shuffled between Wally and Breeth, who moved down the hall like rolling boulders.
The two were still in color while Arthur, Audrey, and KW were in gray.
“All right,” Arthur said, catching his breath. “This might be harder than I thought.”
“It’s that pesky time travel,” Audrey said, hefting KW in her arms and shaking her head. “I tried to warn ya. The past is set in stone.”
“For the last time, it’s a story,” Arthur said. “And it only seems to be set in stone. See, this happens on every adventure. We enter a situation that feels completely hopeless and impossible to escape and spells death for everyone involved … But that’s when we figure out the perfect solution.”
He considered the pieces around them—the hospital and its medicinal horrors, Wally and Breeth and the unstoppable story—waiting for that tingling rush of epiphany.
“Maybe we just need more power,” Arthur said. “Audrey, how do you feel about me writing you some sharper teeth and longer claws, making you so strong you can tear the dragon-bone Quill right out of Moore’s hand?”
“Absolutely not,” Audrey said, shaking her head. “No more canoodling in my noodle.”
Arthur sighed in defeat. “I guess I don’t have anything to write with anyway. The tentacle monster’s slime is as solid as dried sap.”
He was getting more and more nervous. They had to figure something out before Wally reached the second floor and started the process that would create the Eraser.
Just then, Wally stopped walking. He and the tentacle monster had caught up with Alfred Moore, who madly scribbled in his notebook. Coils of blue reflected against the damp walls as a goblin made of pure electricity manifested in the hall. It spotted Breeth with its jittering eyes and struck like a bolt of lightning, sizzling her tentacles.
KW covered her ears while Audrey petted the child’s hair and watched the tentacle monster jerk and smoke. “Poor Breeth.”
“Wait for it…,” Arthur said.
There was a splintering sound in the distance and a triumphant “Ha ha!” A minute later, Garnett Lacroix came strolling up behind tentacle Breeth.
“Oho! Hello there, massive tentacle butt! How do I get around you?”
Arthur winced at his own Gentleman Thief impression. At this point in the story, he’d been in the Stormcrow’s cellar, using the dragon-bone Quill to write as Garnett Lacroix, who easily saved the tentacle monster from being electrocuted.
“Hey, Garnett!” Arthur shouted. “Hey, Arthur!”
Nothing. Arthur couldn’t even communicate with himself.
“Rrg! How are we supposed to change this stupid story if no one can see or hear us and we can’t even move anything?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion of how any of this works,” Audrey said, “but don’t we need to get out of here? Didn’t you say this building was going to”—she placed her paws over KW’s ears and whispered—“fall out of the sky?”
“Well, yeah,” Arthur said, “but Wally turns it into marshmallow at the last moment. If he survived, we can too.”
“Um, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but”—Audrey poked a claw into a nearby squishy tentacle and didn’t make a dent—“even marshmallow will be as hard as moon rocks to us.”
Fear caught Arthur by the throat. “Oh. Right…”
The electric goblin sorted, Wally, Garnett, and Breeth continued forward, shuffling Arthur, Audrey, and KW to the hospital’s winding staircase. Arthur’s nervousness was growing into outright terror. He had to solve this fast.
