A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting #1 Read online

  Jacob stumbled back, wind ripping through the rocking cage. Spit and juice bubbled into his throat. He was going to throw up for sure.

  “Yes, indeed. It’s going to be a wonderful All Hallows Eve!” cackled the Grand Guignol.

  15

  Liz drove us past an old farmhouse with a cornfield and a scarecrow standing watch through the raggedy stalks.

  “Meet at headquarters,” Liz barked into her phone, steering the moped with one hand. “And don’t tell Mama Vee.” She pocketed her cell and gunned the engine.

  “Who’s Mama Vee?” I asked, squinting in the stinging wind.

  “You don’t need to know,” said Liz.

  I glanced back at the farm. I thought I saw the scarecrow’s head turn ever so slightly to watch us go.

  “Why did those things take Jacob?” I asked.

  “Way I figure it is,” Liz said, “if they were going to eat him, they’d have done that by now.”

  The thought of Jacob being eaten stabbed at me worse than the cold cutting through my jacket.

  “Because of some gift?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Gift of what, eating ice cream?” I joked.

  “The Gift of Dreams,” Liz said with a low voice.

  “Say what?”

  A dark covered bridge swallowed us into its shadowy gullet. Shafts of moonlight flickered through the old wood. Our tires thump-thumped across the boards.

  “Jacob can see the future when he sleeps,” Liz said over the engine’s echoing roar. “Lately, he can even manifest his dreams into reality.”

  “M-manifest?” I stuttered.

  “Some kids are born with supernatural powers. One night this summer Jacob told me he dreamed it was snowing. That night, in the middle of the hottest August on record, it snowed.”

  “Supernatural powers?” I exclaimed. “Seriously. That’s like unicorns or Deanna’s nose. It’s not real.”

  I caught Liz’s amazed reflection in the rearview mirror on her handlebar. She was serious. That snowy day in August had rocked her world.

  Very slowly, trying to accept the meaning of the words, I said, “Little loaf has psychic abilities?”

  “Strongest we’ve ever seen,” agreed Liz.

  Liz and I ducked down as a flurry of squealing wings swished through our hair, sending icy shivers up my back. Liz cranked the gas, and we shot out of the bridge with a flock of bats arcing into the sky behind us.

  I gasped for breath, worried I might topple off the moped.

  “What is up with tonight?” I screamed.

  “Halloween, man.” Liz shook her head. “Freaks come out,” Liz said, flicking a fleck of bat guano from her shoulder. “Since his fifth birthday, Jacob’s only gotten more powerful. Been meaning to have the talk with his parents, but Mrs. Z. would poop a duck.”

  My worldview was shifting like quicksand. What Liz was talking about was impossible. But I said the same thing about monsters, and they were now as real to me as the bloody scratch they left on the back of my hand. And if monsters were real, then maybe, just maybe, a little boy with supernatural powers was also real.

  I thought about the burned teddy bear, the creepy drawings, his nightmares . . . Jacob had been telling me the truth all along.

  Black wings scattered into the night sky behind us, and heavy globs of guilt poured into my heart like wet concrete. Jacob wasn’t just a hyper kid. He was unique. He was powerful. He could change the world.

  And I let him get caught.

  Multiple “Road Ends Here” signs crossed our paths before we approached a marsh where water hushed and gurgled over the rocks. The quick pulse of frog croaks filled the air. Like ruins from another time, there was a broken path hidden among the cattail reeds.

  We bumped across the crumbling bridge, tires splashing through a shallow brook. Across the watery path, Liz stopped the moped at a dead end. I was pretty sure we were lost.

  Liz held out a pendant on her necklace. It was a small tin flute that looked like it had been handmade, though I have no idea who had hands small enough to make something so delicate. The flute made a bubbly, warbling harmony when Liz played it, like a blue jay’s whistle. Leaves rustled around us. Branches coiled back, twisting open to reveal a dirt driveway that led up to a rustic ivy-covered cottage. A series of scientific-looking TV antennae jutted out of its thatched and patched roof.

  “Huh?”

  “Welcome to the Rhode Island headquarters for the Order of the Babysitters,” Liz said proudly, swerving us up the path and parking the moped at the front door. Three BMX bikes were leaned against the front of the cottage. A weathered stone statue of a lion, its mane covered in moss, stood at attention as Liz approached the door.

  “Grab the Toadie,” she said, ducking inside.

  I hoisted the canvas bag with the Toadie inside of it off the moped’s carrier and dragged it along the ground. For something so small, the troll was surprisingly heavy and dense, like a bowling ball.

  “Your friends live here?” I asked nervously.

  “I don’t have friends,” Liz said with a sarcastic smile, leaving me to heft the creature inside.

  “Wonder why,” I mumbled.

  Liz twisted a two-pronged key into a double lock. There was a click and snap from inside. The heavy oak door opened to reveal a fanged, skeletal smile leering down at me. I gasped. Liz laughed and walked under the skeleton of a three-headed sea serpent hanging from the ceiling in the entrance hall.

  “If you’re scared of Bessie, then you better just turn around now, Ferguson,” said Liz.

  Portraits of stern-faced babysitters seemed to be watching me slog the Toadie down the hall. The air smelled like musky firewood and a hint of cinnamon.

  Bag squeaking behind me, I followed Liz past a room full of aquariums loaded with snails and worms. Beyond that room there was an oval-shaped library with a ladder on a track that circled the haphazard stacks of books of all kinds: used books, library books, books with covers made of bark, books with pages made of velvet, books made of scrolls, books made from pressed butterflies, half-open books, half-eaten books, and books covered in cobwebs.

  “Do your parents know you do this?” I huffed.

  “Yeah. They’re cool.” She shrugged. “They know I can handle myself.”

  That explains it. Whole family’s crazy.

  Farther into the house, Liz stopped at a large glass window looking into a padded room lined with mechanical dummies and rusty, swinging claw-gauntlets. It looked like gym class for creatures. A girl wearing athletic gear was running across a tightrope stretched over a pool of mud.

  Whoa, that girl is good, I thought. Why does she look so familiar . . . ?

  Liz banged on the window and shouted, “Berna, let’s go!”

  Oh my GOSH.

  Berna vaulted off the final jump in the training room and landed before my totally dumbstruck face. She wiped the sweat off her forehead and adjusted a big pink headband over her thick hair.

  “You . . . go to my school,” I managed to say.

  Berna nodded, plucked a wad of pink gum stuck to the wall, and popped it back into her mouth. “Bernadette. After the saint.” She looked me up and down and blew a huge pink bubble. She inhaled it sharply, cracking it, chewing it. “But you can call me Berna or Bern. Kelly, right?”

  “Yep. Just Kelly.”

  She giggled. “Lemme give you a hand, just Kelly.”

  Berna bent down to help me lift the heavy sack into another room lined with white, discolored tiles, lit by sickly green fluorescent lights. The smell of medicine hung around bizarre instrument panels. Shelves were crammed with all kinds of jarred things pickled in formaldehyde.

  In the center of the room, a girl and a boy—who looked to be my age—were hoisting a rusty-looking cage onto a metal slab. They stood around a circle of moonlight that streamed down from the skylight above them. A large lamp sent their shadows arcing across the wall.

  The boy pushed his thick glasses up his
nose and looked at me with a crooked left eye. The girl with sharp black bangs glared at me and shoved her fists onto her hips. She pinched her entire face into a sour expression.

  Cassie and Curtis. The misfit sitters.

  “Are you sherioush right now?” Cassie said through her wiry braces.

  “You know her?” asked Liz.

  Cassie made a high-pitched “hmph” through her nose and turned back to the cage. Curtis caught sight of the bag that Berna and I were lugging and his eyes widened.

  “What’d you bring me?” he asked.

  “Toadie,” said Liz.

  “You caught one? I can’t believe you caught one!” Curtis giggled, and with great excitement rushed up and cradled the bag full of Toadie in his arms. “Come to me, my little Toadie.”

  “Chill out, Curtis,” Liz said sternly. “Cassie, open the cage. Berna, Curtis, open that bag on three. Everyone, watch your fingers.”

  I stood back as Curtis removed the lock from the top of the bag, Berna unzipped it, and Liz helped them dump out the sleeping Toadie inside the rattling, rusted pen. Berna slammed the cage door shut, and Liz locked it.

  “Search it. See if it’s carrying anything that can lead us to Jacob.”

  They snapped on yellow cleaning gloves and went to work.

  I finally understood just why they seemed so strange to everyone at our school (including me). They weren’t just babysitters.

  “You guys . . . You’re the monster hunters,” I said awestruck.

  “Don’t you mean weirdosh? Total rando trifecta? Freak show?” lisped Cassie.

  I cringed, remembering my shameless attempt to be cool in front of Deanna and the Princess Pack.

  “We fight monsters for a living,” said Berna. “We hear everything.”

  Liz’s eyes bored into me. “You really said that stuff about them?”

  “I . . . didn’t mean it,” I said.

  “Then why’d you say it?”

  I shifted and bit the inside of my cheek. Why did I say it?

  Because I wanted to be cool, I was about to tell them.

  “It’s okay.” Berna smiled. “We are weird. ’Specially this one.” She nodded toward Curtis, who gave a backward salute. Berna’s warm energy made everything feel okay.

  “Did you call Mama Vee?” Cassie asked Liz.

  “No. I got this,” Liz said impatiently.

  “Mama Vee’sh chapter president, Lish,” Cassie continued. “She should be here.”

  “Well, in her absence, I’m commanding sitter on duty,” Liz snapped. “So we do what I say. And I say I got this. End of discussion. Curtis? You bring it?” Liz asked.

  Curtis bolted off and returned carrying a black, stinking bag full of trash. “Fresh from the Dumpster behind Wang’s Chinese.” He took a huge whiff of the trash bag. “Smells like . . . victory,” Curtis crooned.

  Berna and Cassie gagged and turned away from him.

  “Keep it downwind,” Liz said, pointing to the other side of the room.

  “Copy that, sir.” Curtis nodded and hauled the garbage away.

  “And don’t call me ‘sir,’” Liz groaned.

  Chewing gum in deep thought, Berna peered through a magnifying glass and studied the Toadie while Cassie quietly lisped into a microcassette recorder, like she was the host of her own National Geographic show. “Shubject ish roughly two and a half feet tall. . . .”

  I leaned over Berna’s shoulder. “So, are you guys like the Order of the Babysitters?”

  “Not the whole order,” Liz said, shaking her head. “They’re just SITs.”

  “Zits?” I asked.

  “Shtupid rubber bandsh get wrapped around my tongue,” growled Cassie, tugging at her metal mouth.

  Berna laughed. “SITs. Sitters in training. One day we’ll graduate to full-time babysitters,” she said, like she had just eaten a bowl of sugar. “Then we’ll move up to au pairs. Then part-time nannies.” She raised her hand higher and higher. “Full-time nannies. Live-in nannies, chapter presidents. And who knows? Maybe even chief child minders and then maybe one of us will be Queen governess!”

  “Wow,” I said. “You love babysitting.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and shrugged. “But I hate injustice even more.”

  Cassie prodded the sleeping Toadie’s mouth open with long sticks and searched under its tongue. “So, Lish,” Cassie asked. “Why weren’t you with Jacob tonight?”

  “All the signs pointed to Carmella being taken,” Liz mumbled.

  “So you losht Jacob?”

  “I didn’t. She did.” Liz jerked her thumb at me.

  All their eyes shot at me. I smiled sheepishly, like I was posing for a yearbook picture with a giant pimple on my forehead.

  “I . . . I’m just trying to save up enough money to go to camp,” I muttered.

  This was totally the wrong thing to say.

  “Total soup sandwich, man,” Curtis said, shaking his head.

  Cassie snorted and smiled, as if she knew all along I was a terrible person, and my stupid remark had just confirmed it.

  “Oooh, Lish,” Cassie chuckled, wiping spittle from her lower lip. “You’re going to get kicked out of the order for shure.”

  Liz’s hand coiled into a fist.

  “Liz, don’t—” Berna started to say before Liz tackled Cassie to the floor.

  “Stand down, sir!” Curtis kept shouting.

  Cassie cowered in the corner and defiantly straightened her bangs, mumbling something about rules and regulations and fines under her breath.

  Berna saw my jolted expression and smiled. “They do this all the time,” she said with a wink. “You got hardware?”

  I made a confused noise and shook my head.

  “New girl needs hardware.” Curtis saluted Liz. “Permission to leave the lab, sir? I mean, ma’am?”

  Liz nodded. Curtis grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the hallway. He twisted the head of a statue of Joan of Arc, and the sound of gears gnashing and turning thumped from deep inside of the house. A wall across from us shook and then slowly slid down into the floor, leading to a dark, hidden staircase.

  “Ladies first!” Curtis beamed.

  I looked at him strangely. “You first,” I said.

  He clucked and jumped inside.

  We descended the stairs into a room full of frightening weaponry. Ivory saws, the Grim Reaper’s sickle, iron spears, a pitchfork with one bent prong, and a grappling hook attached to a chain.

  Curtis grabbed a backpack from the top shelf and tossed it to me.

  “Let’s get you started,” he squawked.

  16

  Curtis snatched a fuzzy teddy bear from a shelf and carefully handed it to me.

  “It’s actually a grenade,” Curtis said, grinning. “You pull this ear, throw, and—booyah! Frag city! Scorched earth, baby!”

  Curtis mimicked pulling the teddy bear’s ear, hurling it, and then ducking from an enormous mushroom cloud. I held the teddy away from me and slowly, gently set it back on the shelf with its other plush, flammable friends.

  “We paint one ear red so we don’t get it mixed up with a kid’s real teddy bear,” Curtis said, wandering down a row of shelves filled with jars of baby food, diapers, and toys. “We make our weapons look like kid stuff so parents don’t freak out if they look in our packs and see a bunch of monster-hunting gear.”

  He held up a colorful tube of finger paint.

  “Chupacabra venom. Highly acidic.”

  Curtis squeezed a glistening emerald drop onto the floor. The goo sizzled through the concrete, eating a large hole in the floor. Definitely not finger paint. I swallowed and moved away from the hissing puddle.

  With growing excitement, Curtis grabbed an algebra textbook. He opened it, showing me that the pages had been neatly cut out in order to hold four twelve-bladed Chinese throwing stars.

  “Fwing! Fwing!” Curtis pretended to hurl the stars at an unseen monster. “Splat! Glooooop, gloop, gloop.” He made a gesture like bl
ood was gushing from the middle of his forehead.

  “Parents really let you look after their kids?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” he said, shaking his head. “Can you believe it?”

  I laughed and realized that though I had gone to kindergarten with this crazy kid, I had never actually spoken to him. Yeah, he was really weird, but he didn’t hide it. Curtis was one of the good guys.

  Liz darted into the room and saw the burned mark in the floor.

  “This stuff is way too advanced for her, Critter,” Liz said to Curtis.

  “I can handle it,” I shot back. I grabbed a long jousty-looking thing from a rack, and the entire row of weapons smashed to the ground.

  “I’ll pick that up,” I said, cringing.

  Liz growled, grabbed my hand, and slapped a flashlight into my palm.

  “Is it some kind of laser?” I asked, aiming the bulb away from my face.

  “It’s a revolutionary piece of technology that helps you see in the dark,” Liz said, shoving Curtis and me out of the weapons room. “Don’t hurt yourself.” Liz smiled.

  I saw Liz slyly pluck something from the shelf that looked like a tiny, white metallic disk. She shoved it into her pocket and slammed the door behind her.

  We crossed the hallway of looming, ever-watchful portraits of babysitters from the 1700s and went back into the laboratory, where Berna and Cassie were hunched over the snoring Toadie, carefully cutting open its trash bag outfit with a scissors.

  “Stand over there and play the quiet game,” Liz said to me.

  I stood in the corner, hating myself. This is all my fault. I lost Jacob. I had to find him. I remembered the folded paper in my pocket. I fished it out and unfolded Jacob’s drawing of the scary, tall man.

  “Have you guys ever seen a monster that looks like this?” I asked them.

  Berna squinted at Jacob’s hideous, scratchy drawing of the man’s hooves.

  “Could be a Minotaur, but they like warmer climates. And we’re too far north for the Jersey Devil. Check the guide.”