Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Read online

  VITA AND THE MONSTERS OF MOORHOUSE

  BY JILLIAN KARGER

  Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse by Jillian Karger

  Published by Dillian Publishing

  www.JillianKarger.com

  © 2019 Jillian Karger

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:

  [email protected]

  Cover design and formatting by ebooklaunch.com

  To Dan,

  For Everything

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One: Whirlyton

  Chapter Two: Peebles

  Chapter Three: Fironella

  Chapter Four: Welcome Feast

  Chapter Five: The Crossing Cloak

  Chapter Six: The Red Ball

  Chapter Seven: New Friends

  Chapter Eight: First Lesson

  Chapter Nine: The Visit

  Chapter Ten: Some Kind of Thief

  Chapter Eleven: Tardorian

  Chapter Twelve: Spiderweb Cracks

  Chapter Thirteen: Answers

  Chapter Fourteen: The North Wing

  Chapter Fifteen: Lumaria

  Chapter Sixteen: The Inspection

  Chapter Seventeen: Rebuilding

  Chapter Eighteen: The Black Knights

  Chapter Nineteen: The Integrity Test

  Chapter Twenty: The Rose That Turned to Ashes

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Gramophone

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Winner

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Rasper Forest

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Goodbyes

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHIRLYTON

  On the playground Vita and Jen stood on a peeling picnic table with their knees bent in the best approximation of a horseback rider’s pose that two city girls could muster. It was an ordinary playground much like any other with monkey bars, a jungle gym, and a teeter totter. Children scurried around playing tag and jumping rope.

  But Vita didn’t see any of that.

  What she saw was not ordinary—not at all.

  In her mind wisps of white clouds rushed past Vita and Jen as they soared through a jewel blue sky on the backs of a pair of enormous green jays named Pish and Posh. Below them lay the vast green plains of Whirlyton. They flew over meadows overflowing with flowers, and babbling streams, and emerald hills brushed gold with wheat.

  “There’s Landora up ahead!” Vita called to Jen over the roar of the wind.

  “That’s the one with all the canals, right?” Jen asked, her long, beaded braids blowing away from her face in the breeze.

  “Yep!” Vita replied. “And cobblestone streets with shops and cafes on either side.” She frowned. She thought she did an okay job describing the scenery of Whirlyton, but could never find quite the right words to relate the bouncing melody of the jazz that poured through open windows into the streets, or the decadent cookies and miniature cakes that Mr. Chauncy, a bespectacled elephant with whiskers on his trunk, sold at the corner bakery.

  In the past she’d made many attempts to explain how Whirlyton didn’t quite look like the real world, or a cartoon, or a watercolor painting, but was somehow a combination of all three. Vita had tried to show Jen what she meant in pictures she drew, but between Vita’s lack of artistic skill and the limits a pen and paper imposed, Vita never felt Jen got to see the true wonder of the world in which they spent so much of their play time together.

  Jen, now whirling through the clouds on Posh’s back and whooping at the top of her lungs, didn’t seem to mind. “Maybe we should swoop down and take a swim in one of those canals. Would Posh like that?” she asked, her tone lovingly mocking. She knew Posh didn’t like her and believed she could goad him into enjoying her company.

  …She hadn’t had much luck thus far.

  Beneath her, Posh rolled one large black eye. Vita assumed he was rolling the other as well, but it was tough to be sure as Jen and Vita always rode Posh and Pish side by side.

  “It’s easy for her to act so flippant,” Posh bemoaned in his thick British accent. “I would be the only one getting wet.”

  “Aw, c’mon, brother!” Pish admonished. His voice, by contrast, was high-pitched and laced with laughter. “Where’s your sense of fun?” Pish glanced back at Vita, nearly toppling her into the clouds as he did so. If one thing could be said for Posh, it was that he was a slightly less dangerous mode of transportation than his hyperactive twin brother. “You wanna try it, V? I’m not afraid of a little water.”

  Vita hesitated for a moment then nodded. “Yeah, let’s do it!”

  Suddenly she and Pish were nearly vertical, veering headfirst toward the city below.

  A lobster with oars instead of claws rowing down the canal stared up at the incoming green jay in horror.

  “You stay away from my gondola!” he yelled. “You hurt my boat, you pay!”

  “You know we’d never hurt your business, Giuseppe!” Vita called.

  Pish swooped down low enough to pluck Giuseppe’s jaunty cap off the lobster’s head with one of his talons, then passed him and rushed down into the water. Vita giggled as the water rose up around them, forming little waves.

  Giuseppe shook his head as the waves pushed him away from the girl and her bird friend. “Now I have to row all the way back to my post again! You better buy a ride from me on your next visit, little miss!”

  “I will!” Vita replied.

  A moment later, Posh came darting down toward the water as well.

  “Oh, Posh, you changed your mind!” she said.

  “I knew he would,” Jen said with a triumphant smile once she and Posh were flying just above the water alongside Vita and Pish. “Posh always gives into peer pressure.”

  “I do not!” Posh exclaimed indignantly, which Vita promptly imitated for Jen, laughing.

  “I know you’re fun deep down, Posh,” Jen said, petting his feathers as he fumed.

  The two birds rose up into the air again and flew beyond the edges of Landora, making their way toward Nayera Jungle. They flew down close to the tops of the many tall trees and Vita and Jen huddled close to their birds to avoid running into nearby branches.

  On the forest floor below they could see Spiral the snake whirling around in circles, kicking up dirt as he went. Spiral never slithered like a regular snake—he coiled up into a spiral and rolled around like a wheel. He was striped every color of the rainbow and looked like a lollypop all rolled up. An impossibly tall gray bear leaned against a tree nearby, watching Spiral with an amused smile. His smile grew wider when he noticed Vita looking and gave her a small wave. Perhaps Harper looked intimidating, but in truth he was gentle and kind.

  Soon the birds stopped to hover by a particularly tall, thin tree. From one of its branches hung Melina, who had been Vita’s friend for nearly as long as Jen. Melina hung upside down from the long branch, her legs wrapped around the branch and her claws digging into the wood. Her long, spotted tale drooped down to nearly the next branch. She looked a bit like Vita’s cat, Polly, only instead of white and orange Melina was peach and magenta. She also had sixteen legs because Melina wasn’t really a cat at all—she was a caterpillar with an emphasis on the cat.

  Melina’s eyes were closed when they approached, but she slowly opened one yellow-green eye and then the other once Vita was close enough to pat her head. Vita reached out and did just that, and received a rumbling purr from Melina in reply.

  “A little under the chin as well, darling,” Melina instructed, her purr hummin
g beneath her voice. Vita obliged and Melina smiled her wide, white smile. “Thank you.” She crawled off the branch so she could curl around Vita’s neck like a scarf. “Are you girls having fun?”

  “Did you have fun, Jen?” Vita repeated to Jen. “Melina wants to know.”

  “Of course!” Jen replied. “You know I love coming to Whirlyton with you, V.”

  Vita smiled brightly at her friend. With her outgoing personality and pixie-like features, Jen could have broken into the Snob Patrol of popular girls at school with ease. But instead she chose to spend her recesses playing Whirlyton with Vita.

  “Is there anywhere else you’d like to go, Vita?” Pish asked. He tried to look back at her again and the two nearly ran straight into an ancient pine tree. Vita knew pine trees didn’t belong in a jungle—and neither, for that matter, did weeping willows or elm trees. But in Whirlyton all of her favorite trees could coexist in perfect harmony.

  Melina yowled and jumped from Vita’s shoulders back to the branch in surprise. “You should be careful,” Melina scolded Pish, who quickly righted himself.

  “Sorry, Melina,” Pish mumbled quietly. “Would you like to fly over Brickingham Manor, Vita?”

  Vita relayed the question to Jen, who eagerly accepted. The abandoned castle had long been a favorite place of theirs in Whirlyton. They loved to wander over the old marble floors, where flowers struggled to grow through the cracks. Ivy grew over the banisters, balconies, and walls in uneven patches. Vita and Jen tried to climb as high as they could on the castle’s spiral staircases until the old stairs came crumbling down. Pish and Posh always caught the girls before they could follow the old staircases to their unfortunate fate.

  “You take care of my girls, you two!” Melina called as they left the trees of the jungle behind.

  In barely a moment the birds were flying over the expansive abandoned castle. Instead of gray, boring stone, Brickingham Manor was made entirely of vivid red bricks. It had four towers—one on each corner. Each tower led out to the castle’s roof, though the girls always had to be careful to avoid the many holes in the slate.

  One of the black doors still stood while the other rested on the ground. On a sunny day like today, Vita could look through the open doorway into the wilderness that thrived inside the old castle. Bushes full of roses grew in the corners and vines hung like ropes from the rotting ceiling.

  Without warning, Pish dove straight down toward one of Brickingham’s front towers.

  “Pish, look out!” Vita screamed. She gripped Pish’s feathers and squeezed her pale blue eyes shut, preparing herself for impact.

  When it didn’t come, she wrenched her eyes open. Pish had moved out of the way of the tower just in time, but Vita bounced off his back in the process. For a moment she was in free fall, until she landed with a thud.

  Then a voice with none of Pish’s warmth pierced through Whirlyton with an echo.

  “Look, little Q-Tip fell on the ground!” a girl’s voice taunted. “Are you gonna cry for your mommy now?”

  Something like laughter filled the air, and it sounded nothing like Pish’s good-natured chortle.

  Once again Vita saw the unremarkable playground around her. She looked up to find Erica Simmons glaring down at her, flanked by the rest of the Snob Patrol and a few of the most popular boys in Vita and Jen’s class.

  Vita rose from the ground and made some attempt at wiping the grass stains off her clothes. “We were just playing,” she muttered.

  “Right,” Erica said. “Playing. Like you were playing when I heard you mumbling to yourself like a lunatic in the hall yesterday?” She looked around at her friends with a grin. “And it wasn’t the first time, either.” She looked behind Vita and met Jen’s eyes. “I don’t know why you hang out with such a freak.”

  Jen looked at the ground and said nothing.

  Erica turned to leave, then stepped closer to Vita, inspecting her face. “Oooh, Bobby,” she said to the boy standing closest to Vita, “I think Q-Tip might have a crush on you. She’s blushing!”

  Vita’s hands rose to her cheeks, which felt raw and tender. Usually Vita’s father made sure to slather the pale skin that matched Vita’s white-blond hair with 45 SPF sunscreen before she went to school. But he’d left early for work that morning (as he had so many mornings in recent history), so Vita had done it herself. And not very well, apparently.

  Erica’s friends laughed as if on cue, then they all stalked off toward the monkey bars.

  “Forget them,” Vita said. “Erica Simmons wouldn’t know what fun is even if it was a flavor of lip gloss.”

  Jen sat down at the picnic table and still refused to look at her. “I don’t know, V. Maybe she’s right.”

  “Since when do you care what Erica Simmons thinks?”

  “Well, I mean…” her eyes strayed toward the monkey bars, “…aren’t we starting to get a little old for this stuff? It was fine when we were kids, but—”

  Vita crossed her arms. “We’re still kids, Jen—we’re nine.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Is that … is that true what Erica said? About you talking to yourself?” Jen tried to look Vita in the eye, but now Vita avoided her friend’s gaze. “You were talking to Melina, weren’t you?”

  Vita could feel the blood rushing to her face for real this time. She used to only talk to Melina when she and Jen played in Whirlyton. But lately she’d been talking to her imaginary friend quite a bit on her own. She’d thought she was being sneaky, but apparently not.

  “Listen, V. I get it. You’re going through some tough stuff with your family, and—”

  “That’s not what this is about,” Vita said.

  Jen looked unconvinced. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s better if we just don’t play Whirlyton anymore.”

  “But this has nothing to do with Whirlyton!” Vita said with shades of panic in her voice.

  The bell rang to announce the end of recess, and Jen rose from the table. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” she said, and moved toward the school without looking back.

  Part of Vita was glad Jen hadn’t waited for an answer—she was afraid she’d start crying if she tried to talk.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PEEBLES

  “So I decided that you’re an alien,” Vita announced to her father from the backseat of the family’s rusty old clunker. “I thought you might like to know.”

  Ali Lawrence chuckled and glanced at Vita in the rearview mirror, his green eyes crinkled behind his glasses. Vita’s father had a rule that no one was allowed to call him “Alistair” unless he was wearing his smoking jacket. And he didn’t actually own a smoking jacket. …Or at least Vita didn’t think so. She wasn’t really sure what a smoking jacket was. She had always imagined her father’s usual leather jacket, but with smoke rising off the back and sleeves in clouds.

  “Is that right?” he asked her. “Am I from Mars, you think?”

  “Oh, no, definitely not Mars,” she replied. “You’re from somewhere much more exotic than that. For now all I’ve got is that you’re an alien. I’ll have to think more on it and get back to you.”

  “Would that make you half alien?”

  “Oh no, Mom’s an alien too, only a different kind.”

  “A better kind, surely.”

  She met her father’s grinning face in the rearview mirror with a smile of her own. “Just different. Both good.”

  “Well, I appreciate the heads-up, La Dolce.”

  “Anytime, Dad.”

  They stopped outside the front entrance of the high school and waited for Vita’s older brother and sister to appear. After ten minutes Ali looked at his watch and sighed. “Just wait here a minute, pumpkin, I’ll be right back.”

  But he wasn’t right back. Vita waited in the car for ten, then twenty minutes.

  She leaned back into the rapidly warming leather seat and gazed out the window. Even Brooklyn looked nice on a day like this one. She could see the way the green leaves frame
d the row of gorgeous brownstones across the street. The brownstones steadily got less and less fancy the farther they got from the school, the balconies above the front doors and pewter sculptures in the yards replaced by uneven paint jobs and missing roof shingles. Stripes of brown rust decorated turquoise roofs and ivy swallowed up entire facades, spitting out just the windows and doorways like chicken bones.

  But it was these old houses Vita loved the most. The ivy curling over their archways and windowsills was like a stamp, announcing that the brownstones it covered had a history. Bits of chipping paint and a rusting banister proclaimed that a brownstone had watched at least two generations pass in its neighborhood, and would have so many fascinating stories to tell.

  She looked up, startled, as every car door but her own opened. Her brother, Bryan, slouched into the seat beside her with his beat-up skateboard in his lap while their older sister, Michelle, sat up front.

  Ali got back into the driver’s seat, his shoulders considerably droopier than before. “You two are supposed to tell me when you get detention,” he admonished.

  “Mrs. Smellerson took my phone,” Michelle complained. She pulled down the car mirror and used both hands to pat at her already perfect dark brown hair. “She should’ve been the one to get the detention.”

  “Teachers don’t get detention, and her name is Mrs. Ellerson,” their father said in a sigh.

  Bryan said nothing, gazing out the window in his slightly out of focus way, his chestnut curls bouncing along to the beats Vita could dimly hear reverberating through his giant headphones. Unless she asked her father directly she’d probably never find out why he’d been in detention.

  She looked back at Michelle, who was still splitting her attention between primping and arguing with their father. Her older sister hadn’t always been like this. When Vita had been little Michelle had played with her for hours on end, and had even made stacks and stacks of special drawings just for her.

  But these days Michelle rarely seemed to remember Vita existed. And any reminders that she did weren’t pleasant ones.

  They parked the maroon clunker on the street and the four of them walked a few short blocks to Brooklyn Presbyterian Hospital. At first Vita had always looked fearfully at the frail patients lying in hospital beds, tubes snaking out of their noses and arms. But now she was used to it.