B. Larson - Creatures

We almost knocked each other down.

“Connor?” Sarah stared at us and the dungeon door. She blinked. “Did you lock them down there?” she asked, and then she laughed.

I looked at her darkly. I put a hand out protectively in front of Beth, I did it automatically, without even thinking about it. “Don’t get in my way, Sarah.”

Her eyes took in the way that I was protecting Beth. She pursed her lips in a disgusted expression.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you and your girly away.”

I softened my expression. “Thanks,” I said. “Could you play deaf for a while too and leave them down there?”

She giggled and shook her head at me. “One last great prank. Okay, Connor.”

“I owe you,” I said, and as I walked past her, I kissed her on the forehead.

Both girls gave me a bewildered look, and I felt a rush of embarrassment. What had made me do that? Not giving anyone a chance to think more about it, not even me, I ran out of the room with Beth right behind me.

One last prank, Sarah had said. Would this really be my last one?

We found a new hiding place: the dormitories. Who would expect us to simply return to our rooms, the very heart of enemy territory? I figured it was foolproof and the last place they would look, but Beth was quite nervous.

“One of them will come back any second for a hairbrush or something.”

“This room was shared by Jake, Chris Anderson and I,” I said. “The only thing Chris Anderson would come back for would be a nap.”

She laughed quietly, but still seemed nervous. She paged through the book she had lugged up the stairs from the dungeon cell. I’d suggested she dump it a few times, but she had refused. I did get her to put it down for a while.

One of the reasons I chose this room was because of the secret snack supplies. Both Jake and Chris were chunky guys, and they could be counted on to have a stash of food somewhere. We found a bag of chips under Chris Anderson’s bed, but the big score was a full bag of peanuts and a full soda in Jake’s backpack. We ate this happily. Food always tastes best when you are really hungry.

After a few hours of waiting around with our fists shoved up against our cheeks, she began poking around with the book again.

“It must be getting dark outside,” I said, eyeing her and the book. “Maybe we should go have a look around.”

“You don’t want me to read this, do you?”

“Why don’t you put that book down, Beth?”

“What do you think might be written in here?” she asked, looking from the book to me, and then back to the book. She had it laid across her lap.

I hesitated. “Well, some of our family history isn’t very happy.”

“I’ve figured that out.”

“I can’t imagine that a book found in a hidden dungeon beneath our mansion could have a happy story in it.”

She nodded, looking at the book curiously. She polished off spots of dust that still hid in the creases of the leather cover. She opened the book, and my chest tightened. I thought about grabbing it out of her hands, but held myself back.

“There’s a title…” she said.

“What?” I asked.

She smiled. “You sure you want to know?”

“No,” I said. “Forget it. Just close it up again.”

“It’s called Alchemical Experiments.”

I raised my eyebrows. That did sound interesting. Alchemy was the study of half-magical sciences, things that normal schools taught you were all nonsense. In our family, alchemy was considered a legitimate pursuit. I slid closer to Beth. We both sat on Jake’s bed. I cocked my head to read the book with her.

She smiled and opened it up. I scooted close enough to read over her shoulder. There was a date written in flowing longhand script. It said 1782. Beth sucked in her breath. “Was there even anyone living in Oregon in 1782?” she asked aloud.

“Apparently,” I said. “Or maybe this book comes from somewhere else.”

She nodded and we began to puzzle through the book. It was more like a collection of essays than anything else, written on old crumbling parchment and piled in between the leather covers like a binder of loose paper notes. Some of the pages were torn or missing. Others were impossible to read or in foreign languages.

We found a clearly written essay at last. It was titled simply “ The Beginning. ” The first page had been stained so badly you couldn’t read it, but the second page grabbed our attention immediately.

…of course, being of sound mind and memory, this stranger’s story of my own creation seemed preposterous. I could quite clearly recall a family I’d grown up with, but not my early childhood, I will admit. The family that raised me had been an adopted one, or so they had told me. They had all been killed mysteriously one night soon after I’d come of age. I’d spent a century searching for the killers, but without success. I had to admit, however, that the stranger’s story about an alchemist he called the maker was more than an intriguing fantasy. His words disturbed me. I’d heard of alchemists, people who experiment with the thin line between science and magic. Sometimes people called them sorcerers, but others put them in a very different category. For this stranger to come along and inform me that my very long, secret life had started as an alchemical experiment which had gone horribly wrong I found unsettling.

The stranger’s knowledge of me and my secrets I found disturbing as well. I had long known I blacked out at nights sometimes, especially during the fullest cycle of the moon. I often found myself in a disheveled state in the morning, haunted by dark dreams. Sometimes, I later learned that bad things had happened during the night that I had no memory of, but which left me feeling strangely guilty.

Just looking at this stranger and hearing his story about me, with his intense gaze and looming eyes, made me want him to vanish. I didn’t want to think about what happened on nights when the moon was fullest. He became angry when I said as much to him, and I no longer…

Here the paper became torn and unreadable.

Beth closed the book and looked at me.

“What are you doing?” I asked in exasperation.

“You sure you want to keep reading?” she said sweetly. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should stop now.”

I growled at her and opened the book again. Beth and I flipped through the delicate pages as quickly as we dared, looking for another scrap of the story. At last, we found it.

…how I learned that the stranger was indeed a cousin of mine, not through natural means, exactly, but a cousin nonetheless as we both shared the same maker, the Alchemist. The stranger has long since left me. He was barely alive, I should think, after our argument. A lesser man would not have survived at all. I was glad to see him go, but was still disturbed by his story. I made a solemn promise to myself that I would seek out the alchemist. Perhaps he may still cling to life even after centuries had passed. After all, I had continued to live without growing gray-haired and weak, so why would he not have taken the same alchemical baths and thus relieved himself from the burden of aging?

The essay ended there, and we both saw the signature. Beth and I gasped in unison. The name signed at the bottom of the page was Vater.

We looked at each other in shock.

“Vater wrote this?” whispered Beth.

I thought about it for a moment, and it all seemed to make perfect sense. “Of course, he did,” I said. “That story fits with what little I know of him. What gets me is that he might have been locked in down there. Do you think that he was a prisoner there? Do you think that was his cell?”