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.
He took a few steps away from the house and the monkey leaped up from his shoulder, then drifted back down toward him in a long, shallow glide and went once around his head before she flapped again and circled away. She sure seemed like she wanted him to follow her someplace.
Well, it beat lying in bed.
Zaza led Tyler around the outskirts of the house, through an orderly vegetable patch the size of a small baseball field where she plucked and ate a succession of different greens growing close to the ground, then through a tangled, deserted-seeming garden and past a greenhouse at its center that looked like it had been abandoned for a long time. Tyler could see strange shapes through the dirty glass, and in some places huge leaves pressed up against the panes from the inside, as though whatever had once been cultivated in there had been allowed to run riot. It was a little creepy, all that oversized green life just on the other side of cracked glass. He was glad that the little monkey didn’t linger.
She led him around the corner of another building, which was connected back to the house by a long covered pathway. Tyler found himself looking across a big open space with a view of the immense cement half- cylinder of the Sick Barn. He could see the high windows where he had peered in the night before-had it really been less than a day since then? Amazing. But as much as he wanted to see the dragon again, he didn’t want anyone to notice he was out of his room just when Gideon seemed to have forgiven him, so he forced himself to turn away and focus on where the monkey was leading him. Still, he couldn’t help saying to himself, “There’s a dragon in there, and I saw it. A real… live dragon!”
How many other kids could say that?
This house and its buildings and grounds really did go on forever! Tyler’s own room was a quarter of an hour behind him now and the main farmhouse-the part of the house that everyone used most-was completely out of sight. The monkey had led him past more neglected gardens and past several more outbuildings until finally they reached a long, low structure two stories high except for a domed turret looming above the middle of it. Another overgrown garden stretched beside it, full of old, tangled rosebushes and sprawling hedges that had not been trimmed for years.
Tyler trotted down a covered passage lined with wooden pillars that ran the length of the long building, like a covered walkway in a Greek temple-something Tyler had seen in a schoolbook, or more likely, some game design. But instead of being marble, everything was made of wood and painted in shades of brown and gray and green and white. Well, except the parts that were glass, and there were plenty of those. Tall windows lined the ground level as well as the floor above.
Zaza, gliding along in front of him, suddenly halted and crawled through a broken window, disappearing into the building. Dismayed, Tyler wondered, Does she want me to climb in through a twelve-inch hole eight feet off the ground? He had passed at least two doors, though, so he walked back and tried the nearest.
Bingo! The door swung open. Nobody locked anything around here.
Tyler stepped into a small room, a sort of antechamber with dark wood paneling, lots of coat hooks, and a stand with several dusty umbrellas. This wing of the house had the smell of a place nobody had disturbed for a long time, like an underground tomb.
Or a palace, he thought a moment later as he stepped through into a library. More like a palace.
It really was like some fabulous scene in a movie: Tyler grew dizzy just looking up and around. The walls were covered with bookshelves, from the dusty carpets almost to the roof. There was no second floor, just a high ceiling and all those big windows letting the afternoon sunlight stream in. Plenty of daylight still remained, but the old-fashioned electrical lights he’d seen everywhere around the farm hung all around the big room as well, high in the rafters and also on long wires over clusters of overstuffed chairs and sofas. Tyler had the thrilling sense that the farmhouse really was a palace, or even an entire lost ancient city-everywhere you went you found something crazy and wonderful. He had never imagined that there could be so many books in one place-this was a palace of books, an empire of books.
It’s too bad they wasted all this space on ’em, Tyler thought. It could have been a totally sweet game room.
Books, after all, were pretty boring, and he usually did his best to avoid them. It was because his mother was always going on about how kids who read were better than the ones who didn’t-better than game-playing idiots like her own son, she meant. But Tyler knew better. GameBoss and TV were so much more interesting than almost any book-especially this kind, the old kind that surrounded him now, most of which didn’t even have pictures.
But still, he had to admit the place itself was pretty cool.
