There's Something Out There (7 page)

Jenna nodded, remembering the construction
accident that had caused the caves to collapse. For a while, it had been in the news every day. “What did the cave paintings show?” she asked.

“Diagrams of the monster, mainly,” Mr. Carson said. He opened the portfolio and took out a yellowed piece of parchment. On it was a copy of one of the cave drawings. Jenna held her breath as she looked at it; the creature drawn there was so horrible that it defied description. But Mr. Carson tried anyway. “You see what a hybrid it is—a missing link, as it were; part lizard, part bird. And yet the beak is filled with teeth like a mammal, and fangs like a snake. The arms are short compared to the rest of the physique. The wings and tail are also incongruous.”

“What about the claws?” Jenna asked. “I don't see the claws.”

Mr. Carson looked at her sharply. “How did you know about the claws?”

“I—I don't know. I thought I read that somewhere,” she said awkwardly. To be honest, she didn't really know why she thought the creature would have claws. After all, the claw she found in the woods behind her house was nothing. It certainly wasn't one of the Marked Monster's talons. It probably came from a hawk, she had
told herself at the time, and it just happened to be the perfect prop for her scary story.

“Yes, the claws are the one area in which this drawing is inaccurate.” Mr. Carson sighed. “But—given what happened—I can understand why Lewis left them out.”

“Manfred Lewis drew this?” Jenna asked.

“Indeed he did. You see, during the mid-eighteenth century, Lewis enjoyed a classical education at some of Europe's finest institutions. But he longed for adventure and, it must be said, had a rather inflated sense of self. He dreamed of coming to the New World and founding a town. When Lewis identified an uninhabited tract in the central plains region, he set out with a band of extended family and friends. The journey was a perilous one; Lewis's own wife and three youngest children died from fever along the way. But at last the party reached the plains, and Lewis incorporated his very own town—which, of course, he named after himself.”

“Lewisville,” Jenna said.

Mr. Carson nodded. “The settlers had hardly begun laying the foundations for their homesteads when Chief Onongahkan of the Q'ippicut visited them. Lewis made a grave error in approaching the chief with his weapon
raised. But Onongahkan had come in peace. As best he could, the chief tried to warn the settlers. He tried to explain the threat posed by the Keuhkkituh. You see, Lewis had founded the town on the very tract of land the Q'ippicut had dedicated to the Keuhkkituh. The settlers had no way of knowing—or even understanding—the danger they were in.”

Here Mr. Carson paused and sighed heavily.

“What happened?” Jenna asked—though part of her didn't want to know.

“Lewis humored the old chief. I suspect that he thought it was all a story to scare away the settlers. But he couldn't have been more wrong … and he paid dearly for his mistake. You see, right there in front of everyone, he vowed to protect the town from any ‘beasts' that attempted to attack it. It was just weeks later that the stillness of the night was shattered by the Keuhkkituh's cry. And the settlers were still living in tents!

“Lewis set off alone, on foot, armed with a musket. According to his diary, he found the creature in the heart of the forest. As soon as he recovered from his horror at its grotesque appearance, he planned to shoot it in the head. But his musket jammed! He would've been a dead
man if the chief had not appeared at that very moment, brandishing a spear and a torch. According to Lewis, Onongahkan heated the spear's blade in the fire of the torch, then struck the Keuhkkituh with what should have been a fatal blow: The chief sliced a four-foot gash through the creature's belly. Black blood poured from its body, and its howls could be heard all the way back at the settlement. Lewis and Onongahkan left it there to die.”

“Then what happened?” Jenna asked.

“The next morning the settlers and the members of the Q'ippicut tribe returned to the scene of the attack. The dirt was dark and wet with spilled blood, and vultures perched hungrily in the trees, attracted by the smell, likely. But the creature's body was gone. They searched the woods for five days in hopes of finding it, but it had vanished. There were sightings, from time to time; and all accounts report that a long, puckered wound was now visible on the creature's belly—giving the Keuhkkituh a new name: the Marked Monster.”

“So that's why it's called the Marked Monster,” Jenna said thoughtfully. “Not because it, like, marks its victims.”

Mr. Carson looked uncomfortable. “What I've told you so far is pulled from the historical record,” he said
slowly. “We have primary documents that chronicle Lewis and Onongahkan's battle with the Keuhkkituh that night—though for the last hundred years, the town record has more or less been scrubbed of this fact by the town council.”

“How come?” Jenna asked.

“People can be so shortsighted,” Mr. Carson said bitterly. “No one
appreciates
the importance of living in a place steeped in such unique history. Oh no, they're worried that these valuable accounts of our history make a mockery of the town or that the settlers had overdramatized a wolf or other such creature! They'll learn someday. You can ignore the history, but that won't make it disappear. And there are … stories … about the Marked Monster. Stories that cannot be proven—yet, in their very existence, in their sheer persistence, force us to consider that they may perhaps contain an element of truth.”

“What are those stories?” Jenna said, sitting very still.

“Manfred Lewis had a daughter,” Mr. Carson said. “Her name was Imogen, and she was fifteen when her father founded Lewisville. Two months after Lewis and Onongahkan attacked the Marked Monster, Imogen went
berry picking in the woods. She did not return by nightfall.”

“What happened to her?”

There was a pause while Mr. Carson struggled to find the right words. “When her father found her, she was wounded—she had a grave injury to her leg. The flesh had been sliced open nearly to the bone, and Imogen was out of her mind with pain and delirium. Lewis carried her home and began the slow process of nursing her back to health, but Imogen never recovered. Lewis's diary is filled with entries that chronicle not only his anxiety about her health, but the progression of her illness—the wound that would not heal; the way she sat awake all night, wild-eyed with fear, claiming to hear sounds that no one else heard and raving about monsters. In her delirium, Imogen scratched at the walls until her fingers bled.”

Jenna's mouth was so dry she had to swallow twice before she could speak. “What—what happened to her?” she asked again.

“One night Lewis was called away to settle a dispute,” Mr. Carson said quietly. “When he returned to the cabin that he'd built, the door was hanging from its hinges, and Imogen had vanished. A search party banded together
immediately, but Imogen was never found.”

“She disappeared?” Jenna asked. “Without a trace?”

Mr. Carson looked uncomfortable. “Well, there was one trace,” he replied. “Winter had come to Lewisville, and there were several inches of snow on the ground. The snow in the clearing—the one where Lewis had attacked the Marked Monster—was freshly soaked with blood. A great deal of
red
blood, not the black blood of the Marked Monster. At that time, there was no way for the settlers to know if it was human blood, but if it was, it's safe to assume that, if the blood belonged to Imogen, the young girl had exsanguinated.”

“Ex-
what
?”

“Bled to death.”

Mr. Carson took one look at Jenna's face and immediately changed his tone. “Now, now, don't be frightened!” he said. “This is just a story. Manfred Lewis wrote
nothing
about it in his diary, except that Imogen disappeared in the night and was not found, despite many searches.”

“Then how do you know about it?”

“Rumors. Stories, as I said, passed down through generations. For example, the area where the Marked Monster was attacked by Lewis and Chief Onongahkan—and
where all the blood was found after Imogen disappeared—earned a nickname. Settlers called it the Sacred Square. You can see here, on this old map, where it was. Lewis forbade anyone to use it for any purpose. Curiously, it was reported that nothing grew there, even many years after the earth had been soaked with blood. Of course, that wouldn't have surprised the Q'ippicut; they always maintained that every part of the Keuhkkituh was poison.

“There was even a rumor that Imogen herself kept a diary … but it was never found. As the decades passed, sightings of the Marked Monster became far less common, you know. There have been no reports of anyone seeing it for nearly fifty years.”

Just then a librarian poked her head into the archives room. “Mr. Carson? The copier's jammed. Would you mind taking a look?”

“I'll be back,” Mr. Carson told Jenna as he eased himself off the chair. “And I'll copy some materials you can use in your research.”

“Thank you,” she said gratefully, her mind still whirling as she tried to process what the archivist had told her.

As soon as he was out of the room, she remembered something—the soft
thud
she'd heard inside Manfred
Lewis's desk when the lid banged down. With a quick glance toward the door, Jenna hurried back to the desk.

The lid still wouldn't open more than two inches, but it was wide enough for her to slip her hand inside. She wiggled her fingers around, trying to find …

Well. She wasn't sure what, exactly, she might find. But she wanted to know what was in the desk;
what
had fallen and made that noise.

Then Jenna's fingers brushed against something solid—something that inched across the wooden panel when she pushed it. It was smooth, small, and rectangular in shape; she could tell without even looking.

Slowly, carefully, she pulled her hand out of the desk and discovered that she was holding a small journal.

Jenna opened the book. On the first brown-spotted page she found an inscription that made her heart pound so hard she could hear it in her ears. But before she could read another word, she heard the
clump
of Mr. Carson's cane clunking across the floor.

He was on his way back to the archives room.

Jenna didn't even think. She acted entirely on instinct as she hid the journal in her notebook and fitted them into her backpack.

Many hours later, pecking away at the keyboard while the rest of her family watched TV across the room, Jenna stretched and yawned. It felt fake to her—sounded fake, even—but must have been convincing enough, since Dr. Walker glanced at the clock on the DVD player and said, “It's getting late, Jenna. Will you be able to finish in fifteen minutes?”

Jenna knew she had to argue—at least a little—to be convincing. “Mom, it's not even nine o'clock!”

Dr. Walker sighed. “Yes. And fifteen more minutes on the computer, fifteen minutes getting ready for bed, fifteen minutes figuring out what you're going to wear tomorrow—it will be past nine thirty before you know it. Let's not have this argument again, please.”

“Fine,” Jenna said.

But secretly, she smiled to herself.

Never before in her life had Jenna rushed off to bed as quickly as she did that night. Alone at last in the solitude of her bedroom, she turned off all the lights and crawled into bed with a flashlight and the mysterious journal she'd smuggled out of the library.

It was just as she'd remembered.

The smooth grain of the leather cover.

The tear ripped across it.

Those suspicious, sickening splatters across the first page.

And, of course, the inscription:

THE DIARY OF IMOGEN LEWIS

AGED 15 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1767

Jenna's excitement at finding the diary of Imogen Lewis—from the very year in which Lewisville was founded; from the very year in which Imogen herself had disappeared—wasn't strong enough to overshadow her creeping sense of guilt. She could still hardly believe
that she'd just
taken
the book like that. She had never done anything like that before in her life, and the more she thought about it, the worse she felt.
It's a library
, she told herself.
The whole point of that entire building is for people to borrow books. That's all I did—borrow a book. And I'll bring it back as soon as I'm done with it
.

But in her heart, Jenna knew that she was just making excuses. She hadn't borrowed the diary. She'd stolen it. And promising to bring it back didn't change the fact that she didn't have the right to take it in the first place. So she quickly pushed the thought from her mind, because she was obsessed with finding out whatever secrets Imogen might have recorded in her diary.