Fablehaven: The Complete Series (21 page)

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Kendra said.

“We’ll see about that. I better get my camo shirt.”

“First let’s make sure there aren’t any other statues in the yard.”

“Fine, then I’m out of here. I don’t want the trail getting cold.”

After scouring the yard for half an hour, Kendra and Seth had come across various articles of furniture from the house or porch in unexpected locations, but they had found no other life-sized painted statues. They ended up by the swimming pool.

“Have you noticed the butterflies?” Kendra asked.

“Yeah.”

“Anything special about them?”

Seth slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “We haven’t had milk today!”

“Yep. No fairies, just bugs.”

“If those fairies are smart, they won’t show their faces around here,” growled Seth.

“Yeah, you’ll show them. What do you want to be this time? A giraffe?”

“None of this would have happened if they had kept guarding the window.”

“You did torture one of them,” Kendra pointed out.

“They tortured me back! We’re even.”

“Whatever we do, we should drink some milk first.”

They went into the house. The refrigerator was lying on its side. Together they pried the door open. Some of the milk bottles had broken, but a few were intact. Kendra grabbed one, uncapped it, and took a sip. Seth drank next.

“I need my stuff,” he said, bolting for the stairs.

Kendra started searching for clues. Wouldn’t Grandpa have tried to leave them a message? Maybe there hadn’t been time. She walked through the rooms, but encountered no hints to explain the fate of either Lena or Grandpa.

Seth showed up in his camouflage shirt, carrying the cereal box. “I was trying to find that shotgun. You haven’t seen it?”

“Nope. There’s an arrow by the front door. You could toss that at the monster.”

“I think I’ll stick with the salt.”

“We never checked the basement,” Kendra said.

“Worth a try.”

They opened the door by the kitchen and stared down into the gloom. Kendra realized it was just about the only undamaged door in the house. Stone steps led into the darkness.

“How about that flashlight?” Kendra said.

“No light switch?” he asked. They couldn’t find one. He rummaged in the cereal box and withdrew the flashlight.

With some salt from his pocket clutched in one hand and the flashlight in the other, Seth led the way. It was a longer flight than would ordinarily lead to a basement—more than twenty steep stairs. At the bottom the flashlight beam illuminated a short, barren hallway ending at an iron door.

They walked to the door. It had a keyhole below the handle. Seth tugged the handle, but the door was locked. There was a small hatch at the base of the door.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s for brownies, so they can come in and fix stuff.”

He pushed open the hatch. “Grandpa! Lena! Anybody!”

They waited in vain for a reply. He called once more before standing and shining his light into the keyhole.

“None of your keys would fit this?” he asked.

“They’re way too small.”

“There might be a key stashed in Grandpa’s bedroom.”

“If they were down here, I think they’d answer.”

Kendra and Seth started back up the stairs. At the top, they heard a loud, deep groan that lasted at least ten seconds. The penetrating sound came from outside. It was much too powerful to have been made by a human. They raced to the back porch. The groan had ended. It was difficult to say from which direction it had originated.

They waited, looking around, expecting a recurrence of the unusual sound. After a tense minute or two, Kendra broke the silence. “What was it?”

“I bet it was whatever has Grandpa and Lena,” Seth said. “And it didn’t sound too far off.”

“It sounded big.”

“Yeah.”

“Like whale big.”

“We have the salt,” Seth reminded her. “We need to follow that trail.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“You have a better one?”

“I don’t know. Wait and see if they show up? Maybe they’ll escape.”

“If that hasn’t happened by now, it isn’t going to. We’ll be careful, and we’ll make sure to get back before dark. We’ll be fine. We have the salt. That stuff works like acid.”

“If something goes wrong, who saves us?” Kendra asked.

“You don’t have to come. But I’m going.”

Seth hurried down the porch steps and started across the yard. Kendra reluctantly followed. She wasn’t sure how they would pull off a rescue if scalding the monster with salt failed, but Seth was right about one thing—they couldn’t just abandon Grandpa.

Kendra caught up with Seth at the flowerbed where they had originally found the prints. Combing through the grass together, they followed a series of nickel-sized holes across the lawn. The holes were spaced roughly five feet apart and followed a generally straight line, passing the barn and eventually leaving the yard along a narrow path into the woods.

No longer obscured by grass, the tracks were even easier to follow. They passed a couple of intersecting paths, but the way was always certain. The prints of whatever creature had left the holes were unmistakable. They made rapid progress. Kendra remained alert, searching the trees for mythical beasts, but spotted nothing more spectacular than a goldfinch and some chipmunks.

“I’m starving,” Seth announced.

“I’m okay. I’m getting sleepy, though.”

“Just don’t think about it.”

“My throat is getting sore,” Kendra went on. “You know, we’ve been up almost thirty hours.”

“I’m not that tired,” Seth said. “Just hungry. We should have foraged for food in the pantry. It can’t all be smashed.”

“We must not be too hungry if we didn’t think about it at the time.”

Suddenly Seth stopped short. “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

Seth went several paces forward. Leaning close to the ground, he worked his way back past Kendra. He went forward again more slowly, kicking aside any leaves or branches on the trail. Kendra realized the problem before Seth vocalized it. “No more holes.”

She helped scan the ground. They both scrutinized the same segment of the path multiple times before Seth began to search off the trail. “This could be bad,” he said.

“There’s a lot of undergrowth,” Kendra agreed.

“If we could even find one hole, we’d know which direction it went.”

“If it left the path, we’ll never be able to follow it.”

Seth crawled on hands and knees along the edge of the path, sifting through the mulch beneath the undergrowth. Kendra picked up a stick and used it to poke around.

“Don’t make any holes,” Seth cautioned.

“I’m just moving leaves.”

“You could do it with your hands.”

“If I wanted bug bites and a rash.”

“Hey, this is it.” He showed Kendra a hole about five feet from the last one on the path. “It turned left.”

“Diagonally.” She made a line with her hand connecting the two dots and continuing into the woods.

“But it might have turned more,” Seth said. “We should find another one.”

Finding the next hole took almost fifteen minutes. It proved that the creature had indeed turned almost directly to the left, perpendicular to the path.

“What if it kept turning?” Kendra said.

“It would sort of be backtracking if it turned more.”

“Maybe it wanted to throw off pursuit.”

Seth went forward five feet and found the next hole almost instantly. It confirmed that the new course was perpendicular to the trail.

“The undergrowth isn’t as bad here,” Seth said.

“Seth, it would take all day to track it twenty paces.”

“I don’t mean to track it. Just to walk in this direction for a while. Maybe it will intersect a trail and we can pick up tracks again. Or maybe it lives not much farther ahead.”

Kendra put a hand in her pocket, feeling for salt. “I don’t like the idea of leaving the trail.”

“Me neither. We won’t go far. But this thing seems to like trails. It followed one all this way. We may be close to a discovery. It’s worth going a little ways just to check.”

Kendra stared at her brother. “Okay, and what if we run into a cave?”

“We take a look.”

“What if we hear breathing coming from the cave?”

“You don’t have to go in. I’ll look myself. The point is finding Grandpa.”

Kendra bit her tongue. She almost said that if they found him out here, it would probably be in pieces. “Okay, just a little ways.”

They walked in a straight line away from the path. They kept scanning the ground, but noticed no more holes. Before long they crossed a dry, rocky streambed. Not far beyond, they wandered into a little meadow. The brush and wildflowers in the meadow grew nearly waist high.

“I don’t see any other trails,” Kendra said. “Or any monster houses.”

“Let’s take a good look around the meadow,” said Seth. He made a complete search of the perimeter of the meadow, finding neither holes nor trails.

“Let’s face it,” Kendra said. “If we try to go any farther, we’ll be wandering blind.”

“What about climbing that hill?” Seth suggested, indicating the highest point visible from the meadow, less than a quarter-mile away. “If I were going to make a home around here, it would be over there. Plus, if we get up there, we’ll have a better view of the area. These trees make it hard to see.”

Kendra pressed her lips together. The hill was not steep; it would be easy to climb. And it was not too far away. “If we don’t find anything there, we go back?”

“Deal.”

They marched toward the hill, which was along a different line from the course they had originally taken from the path. As they picked their way through denser underbrush, a twig snapped off to one side. They paused, listening.

“I’m getting pretty nervous,” Kendra said softly.

“We’re fine. Probably just a falling pinecone.”

Kendra tried to push away images of the pallid woman with the swirling black garments. The thought of her made Kendra freeze. If she saw her out in the woods, Kendra worried she would just curl up in a ball on the ground and let herself be taken.

“I’m losing track of which way we’re going,” she said. Back under the trees, the line of sight to both hill and meadow was disrupted.

“I have my compass.”

“So if all else fails, we can find the North Pole.”

“The trail we followed went northwest,” Seth assured her. “Then we left it going southwest. The hill is to the west, the meadow is east.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“The only trick is paying attention.”

Before long, the trees were thinning and they were walking up the hill. With the trees farther apart, the underbrush grew higher and the bushes bigger. Kendra and Seth wound their way up the moderate slope toward the crest.

“Do you smell that?” Seth asked.

Kendra stopped. “Like somebody cooking.”

The smell was faint but, now that she noticed it, distinct. Kendra studied the area with sudden alarm. “Oh my gosh,” she said, crouching down.

“What?”

“Get down.”

Seth knelt beside her. Kendra pointed toward the crest of the hill. Off to one side rose a feeble column of smoke—a thin, wavering distortion.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “We may have found it.”

Again she had to bite her tongue. She hoped someone wasn’t cooking Grandpa. “What do we do?”

“Stay here,” said Seth. “I’ll go check it out.”

“I don’t want to stay alone.”

“Then follow me, but stay back a bit. We don’t want to both get caught at the same time. Keep salt ready.”

Kendra did not need that reminder. Her only worry about the salt was that her sweaty hands were going to turn it to paste.

Seth crept ahead, staying low, using the bushes for cover, gradually making his way toward the meager line of smoke. Kendra imitated his movements, impressed that his hours of playing army were finally paying off. Even as she followed him, she struggled to come to terms with what they were doing. Sneaking up on a monster cookout was among the activities she could do without. Shouldn’t they be sneaking
away?

The trembling shaft of smoke grew nearer. Seth waved her up to him. She huddled beside him behind a wide bush twice her height, trying to breathe quietly. He put his lips to her ear. “I’ll be able to see what’s going on when I get around this bush. I’ll try to yell if I get captured or anything. Be ready.”