Iris gave one solemn nod. Swallowed slowly, like her throat was dry.
“Okay,” Vi said, still trying to piece things together. “So why didn’t you say anything last night? Or this morning? I mean, you’ve known about this for over twenty-four hours and you’re just now telling us?”
It didn’t make any sense.
He rolled his eyes. “Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” His voice was whiny. “I knew I needed proof.”
His proof—a Polaroid he’d taken earlier—was sitting on the table in front of them.
“So when it came back tonight, I was waiting. I told everyone I was going to bed early, then I sneaked back outside with my camera. I was hiding in the old rabbit hutch in the backyard.”
“Ew!” Vi said, thinking of all the rabbit pee. Had the hutch even been swept out or was it still full of shavings and old fossilized poop? She pictured her little brother there, flat on his belly in old hay and rabbit shit, waiting for the monster to come back.
“It was the perfect hiding spot,” he explained. “I knew he’d never see me in there.”
“He? He who?”
Eric turned the drawing he’d been working on so Vi and Iris could see it. He’d drawn a humanoid with a blank white face, huge dark eyes, and a heavy black grim reaper–style hood.
“The Ghoul,” Vi said, reading the neat block letters Eric had penciled in at the bottom. The creature’s eyes seemed to pull her in; I know you. I’m coming for you, they said. “So it’s like a ghost or something?” she asked.
“I’m not sure exactly what it is. Maybe it’s one of the undead. A demon. But it saw me, Vi! When I snapped the picture and the flash went off, it looked right at me.”
Vi picked up the Polaroid, squinted down at it. The truth was, it was hard to tell what she was looking at. She could see a form at the edge of their house. If she looked at it the right way, she could see a black-draped figure, a pale face. But it was so blurry, it was hard to make out the details.
“Tell me what it did again,” Vi said.
“It came out of the trees and went right over to the house, started looking in the windows. I think it was looking for a way in.”
Iris came to stand next to Vi and stared over her shoulder at the photo. She was trembling, her whole body vibrating like a whacked tuning fork. “So what do we do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Vi said. She licked her lips, thinking. Waiting for one of the gods to whisper an idea, but they were all silent. Scared off by the Ghoul.
She felt a headache coming on. She’d been getting them more and more often.
“We need to do a spell of protection,” Eric said. He picked up the monster book, flipped through its pages until he found what he was looking for. “We wash the doors of the house with water steeped with sage and thyme, and put kosher salt across all the thresholds, maybe surround our beds with it. Crosses can’t hurt, either. Holy water, if we can get it.”
“Right,” Vi said. “Where are we going to get holy water, Eric?”
“St. Matthew’s?” Eric suggested.
“So we’re just going to bike on over and tell the priest we need holy water to help protect us from a ghoul?”
Eric shrugged. “I was thinking we’d steal it?”
Vi laughed. Her goody-two-shoes brother wanted to steal holy water from a church?
“Stolen holy water,” Iris said. “Doesn’t that wreck its powers or something?”
Eric rubbed his face with his hands. “I don’t know. I’m trying, but it’s hard when we don’t even understand what we’re up against.”
Vi looked down at the Polaroid again. It might not be anything at all, just a shadow cast by the trees, a bright spot caused by the camera flash. Maybe Eric had imagined the whole thing.
But what if he hadn’t?
“Okay,” Vi said. “We do whatever spells of protection we can. And on the next full moon, we go out and try to find this thing. Hunt it down.”
“What do we do if we find it?” Iris asked.
“Banish it or kill it,” Vi said. “Do whatever we need to do. In the meantime, we keep our eyes open. We do research. We try to figure out what this thing is and what it wants.”
Eric looked scared. “It saw me, Vi,” he said, voice trembling a little. “It knows who I am. I feel like… like it knows all about me.”
“It’s okay,” Vi told Eric. “We’ll put a circle of salt around your bed. Draw some sigils on the floor. Hang a cross on your wall. We’ll make sure you’re protected, Eric. I promise.”
* * *
“DO YOU THINK he really saw a ghoul?” Iris asked her later. “Do you think it’s real?”
They were in Vi’s room. Iris sometimes panicked when she slept by herself and often crept in to be with Vi late at night. Gran had figured out what was up, but she didn’t seem to mind.
They’d moved a twin mattress in and set it up on the floor in the corner of Vi’s room—right across from her own bed. Vi had helped Iris make it up with her own spare sheets—white and clean and smelling like sunshine because they were dried on the line in the backyard. Iris slept every night with the rabbit puppet Vi had given her.
She was on her mattress, and Vi was propped up on one elbow in her own bed, looking down. It was after midnight, and they spoke in low voices.
“I think…” Vi chose her words carefully. “… that he believes he saw it.”
“But is it real?” Iris asked.
“Maybe believing is enough to make it real. Maybe if you believe strongly enough, you can actually, I don’t know, conjure monsters.”
“Do you think so? That they’re out there just waiting to be conjured? That there are really… monsters?”
Vi looked at her, there in the dark.
Iris had on a pair of Vi’s old pajamas, and Vi was thinking about the page on doppelg?ngers in The Book of Monsters. A doppelg?nger was a spirit, a creature that looked just like a person, could step right into that person’s life, just take her place and no one would ever know the difference. When you saw a doppelg?nger—if you happened to pass your twin on the street—it was bad luck. It meant something terrible was coming your way.
She and Iris could really be sisters—they looked so much alike, dark-haired, dark-eyed, skinny girls. Vi found herself thinking (not for the first time) that Iris couldn’t be real. That she might be someone Vi had imagined to life, a secret sister.
Could you call a doppelg?nger to you? Conjure it just by believing? Was that possible?
Her head hurt. She’d taken some Tylenol from the medicine cabinet, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good. She pressed her thumbs into her eyes.
“Well?” Iris said, waiting.
“Monsters are real,” Vi told her firmly. “Of course they are. There are just too many people who have seen them for them not to be, you know? Did Eric see a ghoul? I don’t know. I believe he saw something. Or thinks he did. And we need to investigate, find out what it is.”
“Do you think it could be… dangerous?”
“Maybe,” Vi said. “If it’s a monster, then yes, definitely. Monsters are always dangerous.”
“If there are bad monsters out there, do you think there could be good monsters too?” Iris asked.
“I think,” said Vi, “that it’s more complicated than that.” She closed her eyes.
Iris was quiet a minute. Then she asked, voice low, “Do you think there’s a God?”
Vi smiled. “I think there are lots of gods. If you listen, you can hear them talking, telling you things, guiding you.”
“What do you mean?”
So Vi told Iris all about the gods who guided her, even though she’d never told anyone, not even Eric, not even Gran. And when she was done telling, she said, “Close your eyes and listen. What do you hear?”
“The clock ticking,” Iris said.
“That’s the God of Time, he’s saying something to you. Listen carefully. What is it?”
Iris scrunched up her face. “Hurry,” she said. “He’s telling me to hurry. That time is running out.”
“Time for what?” Vi asked.
Iris listened. “He doesn’t say.”