She shivered and went silent for so long that Leo guessed she was done saying her piece and started marching up the hill again. He was too busy anyway, opening the letter from his mother, finding the passages that would certainly have led to trouble had his nursemaid come across them, and carefully tearing the whole into pieces.
He passed the mountain boy already on his way back down, now richer by one bright coin, and Leo did his best to ignore the sniveling reverence the boy made as he went. All Leo’s adventurous spirit was sapped, and he figured he’d spend the rest of the day at chess or something just to show Rose Red what was what and who was whom. Friends didn’t leave other friends in a lurch while ambushing unsuspecting strangers! That sort of thing wasn’t—
A high scream ran up the road to Hill House like a cold chill up a spine. Leo startled and whirled around, brandishing his beanpole and staring down the way he’d just seen the mountain boy go. He told himself to move, to run, but that scream was too terrible, and he remained frozen in place even as Leanbear and old Mousehand barreled past him down the hill, armed with clubs and knives.
They found the mountain boy curled up in a ball in the middle of the road. When at last they could get him to speak, all he would say was, “The monster! The monster!”
7
SO THE MONSTER DID EXIST. There was no denying it now. Leo had seen the messenger boy’s face when Leanbear and Mousehand carried him back up to the kitchen. He had heard his babbling terror, and Leo knew beyond doubt that nobody could invent that kind of fear.
So the monster was real, and much closer than he would have imagined.
Leo was not allowed outside for a week following that event. The weather turned sour in any case, but this did not help Leo’s feelings of pent-up frustration. He worried about Rose Red and her fool goat, somewhere out there in the wilds in the almost constant downpour, with that creature on the loose.
“What did you see?” Mistress Redbird had asked the messenger boy.
“The eyes!” the boy had babbled. “The big, turr-ble eyes! And teeth, so many teeth!”
Leo shivered as he remembered. He’d stood in the kitchen doorway, looking in on the scene as Leanbear and Mousehand stood on either side of the dirty child and Mistress Redbird tried to force something strong down his throat with a spoon. Leanbear knelt before the boy just as he spat out what Redbird had given him, right into the carriage man’s eye. Leanbear backed away, cursing, and Mousehand stepped in to take his place.
“Listen carefully, boy,” said the old gardener. “I need you to answer a few questions. You say you saw big eyes and big teeth. But don’t you think it might have been a fox you saw? Maybe a wolf? They say there’s been somethin’ preyin’ on the flocks these days, and maybe—”
“It were the monster!” The boy’s face went red as he screamed at Mousehand. “Oi knows what Oi seen! It weren’t no wolf, an’ it weren’t no fox neither. It were like nothin’ else ever there was, and it’s goin’ to eat me!” With that, he succumbed to a fit of hysterics that, Leo thought, disgraced the whole race of boys.
But then again, Leo admitted to himself now as he sat in the library and watched the rain beating down on the windowpane, he hadn’t seen the monster for himself. How would he have reacted in the messenger boy’s place?
“Silly, isn’t it?” said Foxbrush from his desk. Leo had done his best to ignore his cousin while cooped up in the house with him these past several days. But Foxbrush, for all his studious ways, was not always one to be ignored. “All this fuss over the monster, I mean. I’ve never seen Leanbear in such a jumpy state, and Mistress Redbird won’t even put the cat out at night.”
Leo leaned his forehead against the window frame, watching droplets chase each other down the far side of the glass. “It’s been raining. That’s why.”
“Huh,” said Foxbrush. “Mistress Redbird would toss that cat out in a cyclone.” He scratched away at the long essay he was composing on how the literary norms of olden days might have affected historical documentation of such infamous figures as the last Queen of Corrilond. Foxbrush found it fascinating, but it was the kind of stuff that gave Leo a strong urge to push his cousin out the window.
Nevertheless, after penning a few more lines, Foxbrush turned to Leo once more, a small smile on his face. “So is it the rain that’s keeping you from your silly games in the woods?”
Leo shrugged.
“A little bad weather has never stopped you before.”
Leo shrugged again. Old Mousehand was out in the garden working away despite the rain, his narrow shoulders covered only with a short cloak, which, as far as Leo could tell from the library window, was not waterproof.
“They’re scared you’ll get eaten by the monster, aren’t they?”
Still Leo made no answer. He watched the gardener moving arthritically about the garden, covering certain blooms with protective sacking, tying back trailing vines, replanting fallen beanpoles.
“Are you scared of being eaten, Leo?”