Chapter 51
PANDORA’S DIARY
“At least the hobgoblins stopped,” Leo said, because they were snorting and growling like enraged bulls but staying away from the huge rotting mound.
“What scares a hobgoblin?” I said.
“I don’t want to know,” Leo said, as a figure rose from the center of the mound.
I expected a twisted horror, a demon goblin or a Godzilla hobgoblin. Instead, a plump woman stood there, wearing a polka-dotted dress and a knitted cap.
“Hattie?” Leo asked, his voice disbelieving. “Is that you?”
My throat clenched but I tried to sound reassuring as I said, “D-don’t worry, Hattie, we’ll get you out of here.”
Hattie glided toward us across the ravaged books and unwinding vines, but she didn’t move right.
She didn’t walk right. She looked almost as if she were floating.
And as she got closer, my stomach tightened at the green lines crisscrossing her round, pleasant face, like shattered pottery clumsily glued back together.
“Shit, she looks worse than Albert,” I murmured to Leo before raising my voice. “Okay. Okay, we’re here now, we’ll—”
“You’re familiar with our childhood trip to New York,” Hattie interrupted, in a voice like dry leaves.
“Uh,” I said.
“The city frightened us. So many people, so much pollution, such a stink in the air. We hid in a forgotten corner, we squeezed into a crawlspace. That’s how we stumbled upon an ancient cache of gold coins, a bestiary, and a bag of seeds.”
“The Lost Shipment,” Leo murmured. “Hattie found the Lost Shipment.”
“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Hattie’s the bad guy?”
“Not her, them,” Leo said. “Like Albert told us.”
“Seeds.” Hattie glided closer in her uncanny way. “We planted the seeds deep.”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing my fear. “This is good. We’re talking. Let’s keep chatting and—”
“I’ll jump her,” Leo whispered, barely audibly. “You run for the exit.”
“We’ll both jump her.”
“We didn’t plant the seed in our little pot. No, no. That was protective coloration, so you’d see us as benign, unthreatening. Ask us where, Pandora. Ask us where we planted the seed.”
“Wh-where?” I asked.
“Inside our own body. Good Hattie, precious Hattie. She swallowed the seed and we sent roots into her fertile soil.”
Beside me Leo tensed to attack Hattie—and a dozen tendrils rose around the plant-woman like defensive pillars, each one as thick as my wrist.
“So much for rushing her,” I murmured to him.
“We spent years!” Hattie rustled more loudly, as the tendrils swayed. “We spent decades preparing, fertilizing the manuscript with island magic.”
When she turned toward Leo, I realized how she was gliding so smoothly: because she didn’t have legs.
Instead, a waist-thick vine emerged from the bottom of her polka-dotted dress and vanished into the vegetation below.
Some horrible plant-monster was wearing Hattie, the husk of Hattie, like a finger puppet.
“Where’s the rest of her?” Leo whispered.
“We fed the bestiary to waken the beasties, so they’d chase you from our island. To claim the land for ourselves. We fertilized the manuscript until it was plump and shiny, ripening in the library and then—”
“Listen, Hattie,” I said, trying to engage with this thing. “Can we back up and—”
“And then you!”
“Uh,” I said. “Me?”
A tendril whipped from the ground beside Hattie and slapped my face. “You almost ruined everything!”
I gasped in pain, then grabbed Leo’s arm to stop him from jumping her. I needed to buy time, even if I didn’t know for what, so I said, “H-how did I do that?”
“When we called the beasties to serve us, the manuscript should’ve burned.
Ashes to fertilize my crops. There is no way to banish us once the manuscript is gone.
But then you! You summoned the other creatures and the book survived.
We sent my beasts to collect the illuminated manuscript but goblins cannot tell books apart. ”
“You know why?” Leo asked, edging toward her. “Because they’ve got the brain power of a potted plant.”
“You cannot distract me with petty insults. And you’re wrong—” Hattie pulled the manuscript from a fold in her green-veined dress. “They succeeded.”
“Are you sure that’s the right book?” he continued, taking another step. “Maybe you need an expert to—”
Three tendrils lashed at Leo. He blocked one with his oar, but the other two slammed into his chest. He staggered and a fourth one caught him in the head so hard that I heard the impact.
“Leo!”
He dropped to the ground, moaning—and rage like I’d never felt flared behind my eyes. She’d hurt him. She’d hurt him, and he was mine. Maybe I didn’t like him right now but he was mine. With bared teeth I slammed a tendril with my iron skillet, but the others shrank away before I could hit them.
The tendrils didn’t matter, though. The vines and leaves didn’t matter. I needed to strike this creature at the root. My breath came fast as I cobbled together a plan, but I forced myself to stand there silently while my rage turned from red-hot to ice-cold.
“Now you will destroy the book so my beasties can remain here forever,” Hattie said.
“Why don’t you destroy the book?” I asked. “You’ve destroyed all these others. What’s stopping you?”
“You. Pandora. You’re the one who opened it. You must be the one to destroy it. That will close the path forever. You will destroy the book, or we will fertilize our crops with your flesh.”
“My dad always told me I’d make terrible fertilizer. Too many fatty foods. French fries, fried chicken, ice cream—” The hobgoblins began to growl and I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, fine! Fine, I’ll do it.”
Hattie glided closer, the phalanx of tendrils orienting toward me. “You will. Use your gift—but no touching! Don’t touch. You tell the manuscript that it is done. So it can fade. Now!”
“I will. I promise, but—”
“Or we drink your blood with our roots!”
“I need to understand first! That’s how my gift works.
So Hattie found this seed and book in New York.
And after you, uh, grew inside her, you used the gold coins from the Lost Shipment to, what?
Anonymously pay that real estate company to buy land, once the goblins chased everyone away?
Wow, Gabe’s not going to like that his girlfriend was a part of this. ”
“The island is my nursery!” Hattie crackled, sliding to within an arm’s length of me. “We will send a million airborne seeds across the oceans, and each one will plant a million seeds and sprout inside animals and—”
And I smashed her in the face with my skillet.
Iron weakens magical creatures—that’s why the folk couldn’t escape those birdcages—and when my skillet struck Hattie’s cheek, her human flesh fell away, to reveal a grub-white snarl of root fiber that looked like a melting hobgoblin head.
Hattie hissed, but didn’t even recoil. Instead, they head-butted me.
As I reeled backward, tendrils unfurled from the ground, grabbing my wrists and tugging me to my knees. Pain half-blinded me and my skillet flew across the clearing as a vine slithered in front of my chest, shaping itself into a spear.
Hattie smashed my face with the manuscript. “You will bleed.”
I heard myself whimper as pain burst in my cheek. I didn’t have a plan beyond stalling her. I couldn’t stop her. Leo was still moaning in a heap and the vine spear stabbed forward to impale me—
Violet burst from my shirt. She blew a cloud of pixie dust straight into Hattie’s monstrous face while Bob launched from Leo’s pocket and sliced at the vines with his sharp wings.
Hattie shrieked, and pierced Bob through the middle of his little body with the sharp tip of a vine.
“No!” Leo moaned.
As Hattie recoiled from the pixie dust, Bob fell to the ground bleeding and I yanked the manuscript from Hattie’s tendril fingers. I forced myself to my feet and stumbled through the sparkles toward the still mostly empty cage. If I got inside, the iron bars might protect me for a few seconds.
“Stop her!” Hattie rasped at the hobgoblins. “Hurt her!”
I staggered into the iron-barred cage and realized that no, she hadn’t yelled at the hobgoblins: she’d yelled at the hobgoblin. The one, single, solitary hobgoblin, which was now eight feet tall, four hundred pounds, and mad with rage.
As the monster bellowed, and clomped toward me, I opened the manuscript.
I only had a few seconds to fix this.
With my heart thundering, I flipped to the musical notations at the end of the book. I tried to take a calming breath but the hobgoblin roared in rage.
It was furious because Leo was rising unsteadily to his feet between us.
Leo was tall—like an ancient gladiator, Diary—but he looked tiny in front of that monster.
Still, he didn’t waver. He’d lost his wooden oar, he’d lost his beloved Bob, yet he didn’t take a single step backward.
He just rolled his shoulders like he was going to wrestle this freak of gristle to the ground with his bare hands.
I forced myself to look away. I found the neumes on the page and started humming. I heard a fleshy smack and winced—but kept humming. I remembered the tune from the library, I remembered the melody swirling in the air and the taste of the rhythm, like rose milk and caramel.
A thousand stars above me glimmered along with the fading particles of pixie dust.
Another smack sounded, and my panicked gaze flickered toward Leo.
Blood flowed from his mouth and nose, and my hand tightened into a fist. Still, I began singing the wordless tune while he reeled toward the hobgoblin, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs.
I couldn’t stand seeing Leo hurt, seeing him suffering—but I didn’t look away.
I refused to look away.
And I refused to stop singing.