“Watch, then.” Mrs. Needle folded the bloodied handkerchief into a ball so that only the white was visible, then closed her fingers around it entirely, making a fist. “Look closely!” She opened her hand and the wadded handkerchief slowly unwound until the bloodstain was again visible-but it had changed shape. Now it looked like the silhouette of a girl. With its long, straight hair it could almost be Lucinda herself. Then the red silhouette began to move. It might only have been Mrs. Needle gently flexing her hand, but it looked like the little blood-Lucinda was… dancing.
“Oh.” Lucinda let out her breath. “Oh, wow! How do you do that?”
Mrs. Needle closed her fingers on the handkerchief once more. “Just a little trick. An amusement. You enjoyed it?”
Lucinda felt as if her head was as big and round and light as a helium balloon. “Can you do it again?”
Mrs. Needle’s shook her head sadly. “It only works once, I’m sad to say.” She brightened. “But if you could bring me something of your brother’s, I could show you another charming trick. Would you like that?”
“Something of…?”
“Blood, like this. Or maybe just some hair… ”
“But I don’t know where he is. He went out somewhere.”
“Did he now? Well, why don’t you have a look in his room? Perhaps he’s left a comb there.” When Mrs. Needle smiled she looked like a beautiful queen from a fairy tale. “Why don’t you go see?”
“I’ll get lost again,” Lucinda told her sadly.
“No, you won’t. Just go out that door. Oh, do hurry-I’m having such a good time with you, I don’t want to waste any of it.”
Lucinda walked to the door, dizzy and uncertain. It felt like the most popular girl in school had suddenly decided she wanted Lucinda for a best friend, and that was thrilling-wasn’t it?
Mrs. Needle had been absolutely right. Once out the door, Lucinda climbed a single staircase and found herself in the hallway she shared with Tyler. He still wasn’t back, but she pushed his unlatched door open and went in. It was already a typical Tyler mess, which was pretty impressive considering he’d only had a day or so to get it started. She found his hairbrush where he’d dropped it on the floor near the bed, its bristles snarled with his light brown hair. Normally she wouldn’t have touched any of Tyler’s personal items without putting on a hazmat suit, but at this moment she was feeling dreamy, and distant, and the prospect of not doing this thing seemed so hard, like swimming against incoming waves… It wouldn’t matter so much anyway-not really.
She found her way back to Mrs. Needle’s room with the same weird ease-one moment she was in the hall, the next sitting at the table again.
“Oh, well done.” Mrs. Needle clapped her hands. There was something so charmingly open, the way she did that. “Here, let me have it.” The Englishwoman peeled one of Tyler’s long hairs out of the knot wrapped around the bristles and put the single hair in a little dish, then passed her hand over it once and struck a match. The hair burned blue for a moment and made a puff of smoke that seemed far too large for the size of the flame, then the smoke swirled into a shape-Tyler’s face, as unmistakable as a photograph. Her brother was brushing his hair and his features were contorted in a grimace of pain because the hairbrush had caught in a tangle. Lucinda and Mrs. Needle both laughed. A moment later the smoke-Tyler fell apart.
“That’s amazing!”
“I’m so glad you enjoyed it.” Mrs. Needle handed her back the hairbrush. The entire tangle of hair was gone from the bristles, although she had only burned one. “I do love to make children happy. Now, have some more tea, dear, and let’s talk. I want you to tell me everything. You see, I’m really very interested in you and Tyler, but I know so little about you.” Mrs. Needle laughed again and patted Lucinda’s arm. “Did your mother give you good advice for your trip in the days after she received Gideon’s letter?”
Lucinda giggled in sour amusement.
“She must have had some wise things to say, your mother.”
When Lucinda’s giggles became outright laughter, Mrs. Needle frowned kindly and put her cold hand over Lucinda’s. “I’m so sorry-I don’t mean to pry if it’s difficult to talk about her. Is she hard to get along with?”
“Yeah, sometimes,” said Lucinda. “She doesn’t really listen to me.” She frowned, trying to remember. “What did she say? God, she’s always talking, but she never really says anything. Oh yeah. She said she hadn’t known we had a rich relative and would we please not scare him off. Ooh,” she said, full of a pleasurable sense of naughtiness.
“I feel like I want to tell you just everything.”
“Then do so, dear,” Mrs. Needle said, smiling. “We’ll be such good friends! I promise you won’t find a better listener than me.”
Lucinda talked and talked, and out came more than she had ever told anyone in her life. She didn’t know why she wanted to talk so much today, but it seemed so natural to share all kinds of secrets as the sky went from dark purple to black beyond the windows, as the two of them sat like old friends in the room reeking of white lilies and the faint tang of blood.
Chapter 10
W hen he first got back from meeting Eliot the sea monster, Tyler had been exhausted, but after a few minutes of lying on his bed and feeling the afternoon get hotter, he knew it would be harder to fall asleep than it used to be on Christmas Eve when he was a kid. How could he just lie there? He was in the middle of the biggest adventure a kid had ever had-like something out of the most spectacular special-effects movie of the year. It made a top-of-the-line video game like Deep End seem like Pong or some other ancient history. Dragons! Unicorns! Sea serpents!
What if there were real dinosaurs here too? Or outer-space creatures? And where had they all come from?
A scratching at the window distracted him. Something was sitting on the sill, a bundle of gray and white with a pink face and two huge eyes.
The monkey! The flying monkey!
Tyler went slowly toward the window, careful not to frighten the little animal. He stared. The monkey stared back, seemingly undisturbed by his nearness. It wasn’t very big-less than a foot tall, greenish gray on the back and pale on the belly, with a spiky green-gray cap of fur atop its round little head like a hairstyle out of some hilariously ancient 1980s music video. What was most amazing, of course, were the wings, although they were folded and hard to see. It didn’t have a separate pair of wings on its back like an angel (or like the only other flying monkeys he knew about, the ones in The Wizard of Oz), but instead they were more like a bat’s, stretching between its arms and its knees.
What had Uncle Gideon called it?
“Zaza?” he said quietly. The monkey tipped its head and stared at him as though Tyler, of the two of them, was the more unlikely creature. Tyler lifted his hand to touch the glass. “Zaza?”
The monkey tilted over backward and dropped off the windowsill so unexpectedly that Tyler felt his heart stumble for a moment, as though he had broken an expensive ornament, but the monkey only spread her wings and sailed in a lazy circle down to the cherry tree below Lucinda’s window. She stopped there, clinging upside down to a branch, still watching him with her shiny, dark little eyes as if she was waiting for something.
She seemed to want Tyler to follow her.
He wasn’t quite sure how he found his way down through the confusing maze of stairs and hallways, and down to the ground floor and then outside-he seemed to do better with this house when he didn’t think about it too much-but a few minutes later he was standing beneath the bough of the cherry tree looking up at the winged monkey. The dry grass crackled under his feet and the hot air was full of little buzzing things.
“So is that really your name, huh? Zaza? That’s a funny name.”
The monkey yawned as though Tyler was a fine one to talk but she wasn’t going to be rude enough to say anything about it. Then, without warning, she dropped down from the tree onto his shoulder. Tyler jumped and said, “Hey!” but she only settled in and began to scratch herself. He was surprised by how light she was. For her size he’d expected her to be something like a small cat, but instead she didn’t seem to weigh much more than his long-gone hamster, Fang, although she was a great deal bigger.