英语小说网

It turns out they don't really get along.

Granny's fairy tales from Miamas were fairly dramatic, as a rule. Wars and storms and pursuits and intrigues and stuff, because these were the sorts of action stories that Granny liked. They were hardly ever about everyday life in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. So Elsa knows very little about how monsters and wurses get along, when they don't have armies to lead and shadows to fight.

It starts with the wurse totally losing its patience with The Monster when The Monster tries to wash the floor under the wurse while the wurse is still lying on it, and then, because The Monster is extremely reluctant to touch the wurse, he accidentally spatters some alcogel in its eye. Elsa has to intervene to stop a full-blown fight, and later when The Monster with extreme frustration insists that Elsa must put one of those blue plastic bags on each of the wurse's paws, the wurse thinks it's gone far enough. In the end, once twilight is falling outside and she's certain that the police are not still hanging about on the stairs, Elsa forces them both outside into the snow, to give herself a bit of peace and quiet to think over the situation and decide what to do next.

She would have worried about being seen by Britt-Marie from the balcony, except that it's six o'clock sharp and Britt-Marie and Kent have their dinner at exactly six o'clock because "only barbarians" eat their dinner at any other time. Elsa nestles her chin into her Gryffindor scarf and tries to think clearly. The wurse, still looking quite offended by the blue plastic bags, backs into a bush until only its nose is sticking out of the branches. It stays there, its eyes focused on Elsa with a very dissatisfied expression. It takes almost a minute before The Monster sighs and makes a pointed gesture.

"Crapping," mumbles The Monster, and looks the other way.

"Sorry," says Elsa guiltily to the wurse and turns away. They are using normal language again, because something in Elsa's stomach turns into a dark lump when she talks in the secret language to anyone but Granny. Either way, The Monster doesn't seem too keen on any language. Meanwhile, the wurse looks like you or I might if someone came barging in while you were attending to nature's needs, and it took a while before they understood how inappropriate it was to stand there gawking. Only then does Elsa realize that it actually can't have had a chance to relieve itself for several days, unless it did so inside its flat. Which she rules out because she can't see how it could have maneuvered itself into using a toilet, and it certainly wouldn't have crapped on the floor, because this is not the sort of thing a wurse would demean itself by doing. So she assumes that one of the wurse's superpowers is clenching.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to sound rude. I just wanted to know what sort of accident."

He shakes his head. Elsa continues pointing at his trousers, because she has seen this type of trousers on the news.

The Monster nods.

"Those are soldier trousers."

"Are you a soldier?" asks Elsa, pointing at his trousers.

"Accident," The Monster replies even more tersely.

"No shit, Sherlock -- I wasn't implying you did it on purpose."

She turns to The Monster. He rubs his hands together and looks down at the tracks in the snow as if he'd like to smooth out the snow with an iron.

"How did you get that scar?" asks Elsa, pointing at his face.

("No shit, Sherlock" is one of her favorite expressions in English. Her father always says one should not use English expressions if there are perfectly good substitutes in one's own language, but Elsa actually doesn't think there is a substitute in this case.)

"Why are you wearing soldier's trousers if you're not a soldier, then?" she interrogates.

"Old trousers," The Monster replies tersely.

She understands that he is alluding to her, not to himself. She points at the wurse.

"Normal accident," he growls, as if that settles matters. The Monster disappears under the huge hood of his jacket. "Late now. Should sleep."

"That one has to sleep with you tonight."

"Not sleep there. Can't. Not sleep there. Can't. Can't. Can't."

The Monster looks at her as if she just asked him to get naked, roll in saliva, and then run through a postage stamp factory with the lights off. Or maybe not exactly like that. But more or less. He shakes his head, so that his hood sways like a sail.

The Monster retracts deeper into his hood. Points at Elsa.

Elsa puts her hands on her stomach and glares at him. "Where's it going to sleep then?"

The wurse comes out of the bushes, making a lot of noise and looking offended. Elsa clears her throat and apologizes. "Sorry. I didn't mean 'that thing' in a bad sense."

Elsa snorts. "Mum didn't even let me get myself an owl! Do you get how she'd react if I came home with that t-h-i-n-g?"

"Wrote 'sorry,' " he says without turning around.

Elsa rolls her eyes, realizing that if she presses the point he'll probably have a heart attack. The Monster turns away and looks as if he is trying to insert an invisible eraser into his brain to banish that image from his memory.

The Monster breathes grimly under his hood.

The Monster sighs and shakes his head and nods towards the entrance of the house.

"What did Granny write in the letter?" she asks him.

"Late now. Sleep," he growls.

The Monster rubs his hands in circles faster and faster, and starts to look as if he's panicking, and hisses down at the ground: "Shit on fur. Has shit on fur. Shit on fur."

The Monster looks like a very tired person being kept awake by someone thumping him at regular intervals, as hard as he can, with a pillowcase filled with yogurt. Or more or less, anyway. He looks up and frowns and evaluates Elsa, as if trying to work out how far he could fling her.

The wurse looks a bit as if it's close to muttering, "Sure you didn't."

"Not until you tell me about the letter!"

"But what else? It was a really long letter!"

Elsa steps closer to show him that she's not afraid of him. Or to show herself.

Elsa hears muted panting from the other side of the yard and turns around. George comes jogging towards the house. She knows it's George because he's wearing shorts over his leggings and the greenest jacket in the world. He doesn't see her and the wurse, because he's too busy bouncing up and down from a bench. George trains a lot at running and jumping up and down from things. Elsa sometimes thinks he's in a permanent audition to be in the next Super Mario game.

He hunches up inside his hood and starts walking off through the snow.

"Wrote 'protect castle,' " he repeats.

"And what else?"

Then he disappears in the darkness and is gone. He disappears a lot, Elsa will learn in due course. He's surprisingly good at it for someone so large.

The wurse brushes past her legs so its coat tickles her all the way up to her forehead, and she's almost knocked down by the force of it. She laughs. It looks at her and seems to be laughing as well.

"Protect you. Protect Elsa."

"Come!" whispers Elsa quickly to the wurse to get it inside before George catches sight of it. And to her surprise, the mighty animal obeys her.

The wurse doesn't look hugely impressed, but it lies down and rolls onto its side and peers nonchalantly into the parts of the cellar that still lie steeped in darkness. Elsa checks where it's looking, then focuses on the wurse.

She makes sure Britt-Marie is not prowling about on the stairs and that George still hasn't seen them, and then she leads the wurse down into the cellar. The storage units are each assigned to a flat, and Granny's unit is unlocked and empty.

The wurse lies unconcerned on its side on the floor, its hatchet-sized incisors glinting through the darkness.

Apart from Granny, the wurse is the first friend Elsa has ever had.

"You have to stay here tonight," she whispers. "Tomorrow we'll find you a better hiding place."

"Granny always said there were ghosts down here," she says firmly. "You mustn't scare them, d'you hear?"

"I'll bring more chocolate tomorrow if you're nice," she promises.

The wurse looks as if it is taking this concession into consideration. Elsa leans forward and kisses it on the nose. Then she darts up the stairs and closes the cellar door carefully behind her. She sneaks up without turning on the lights, to minimize the risk of anyone seeing her, but when she comes to Britt-Marie and Kent's flat she crouches and goes up the last flight in big leaps. She's almost sure that Britt-Marie is standing inside, peering out of the spyhole.

The other children keep their distance, watching her guardedly. Rumors of The Monster's intervention outside the park have spread, but Elsa knows it will only last a short while. It happened too far from school. Things that happen outside school may as well be happening in outer space, because she is protected in here anyway. She may have a respite of a couple of hours, but those who are chasing her will keep testing the boundaries, and once they drum up the courage to have another pop at her they'll hit her harder than ever.

The next morning both The Monster's flat and the cellar storage unit are dark and empty. George drives Elsa to school. Mum has already gone to the hospital because, as usual, there's some emergency going on there and it's Mum's job to sort out emergencies.

George talks about his protein bars the whole way. He bought a whole box of them, he says, and now he can't find them anywhere. George likes talking about protein bars. And various functional items. Functional clothes and functional jogging shoes, for example. George loves functions. Elsa hopes no one ever invents protein bars with functions, because then George's head will probably explode. Not that Elsa would find that such a bad thing, but she imagines Mum would be upset about it, and there'd be an awful lot of cleaning. George drops her off in the parking area after asking her one more time if she's seen his missing protein bars. She groans with boredom and jumps out.

Eventually she lets herself drift off in her own thoughts. That is probably why she doesn't see it. She's thinking about Granny and Miamas, wondering what plan Granny had in mind when she sent her out on this treasure hunt; that is, if she had any plan at all. Granny always sort of made her plans as she went along, and now that she's no longer there Elsa is having problems recognizing what the next step of the treasure hunt is supposed to be. Above all she wonders what Granny meant when she said she was worried that Elsa would hate her when she found out more about her. Up until now Elsa has only found out that Granny had some pretty dodgy friends, which was hardly a shock, you might say.

And she knows that The Monster will never get anywhere near the fence even for her sake, because schools are full of children and children are full of bacteria, and there's not enough alcogel in the whole world for The Monster after that.

In the first break she allows herself a walk along the fence. She tightens her backpack straps from time to time, to make sure it isn't hanging too loose. She knows they won't be chasing her now, but it's a difficult habit to break. You run slower if your backpack's loose.

But she enjoys her freedom that morning in spite of all. It's the second-to-last day before the Christmas holidays and after tomorrow she can have a couple of weeks of rest from running. A couple of weeks without notes in her locker about how ugly she is and how they're going to kill her.

And Elsa obviously understands that Granny's statement about who she was before she became a granny must have something to do with Elsa's mum, but she'd rather not ask Mum unless she has to. Everything Elsa says to Mum these days seems to end in an argument. And Elsa hates it. She hates that one can't be allowed to know things unless one starts arguing.

So it must be for that reason that she doesn't notice it. Because she's probably no more than two or three yards away when she finally sees it, which is an insane distance not to see a wurse from. It's sitting by the gate, just outside the fence. She laughs, surprised. The wurse seems to be laughing as well, but internally.

And she hates being as alone as one can only be without Granny.

"I looked for you this morning," she says, and goes into the street, even though this is not allowed during breaks. "Were you nice to the ghosts?"

The wurse doesn't look as if it was, but she throws her arms around its neck all the same, buries her hands deep in its thick black fur, and exclaims: "Wait, I've got something for you!" The wurse greedily sticks its nose into her backpack, but looks remarkably disappointed when it pulls it back out again.

"They're protein bars," says Elsa apologetically. "We don't have any sweets at home because Mum doesn't want me to eat them, but George says these are mega-tasty!"

She knows that the other children in the playground see her do it. The teachers may be able to avoid noticing the biggest, blackest wurse appearing out of nowhere in the morning break, but no child in the entire universe could.

No one leaves any notes in Elsa's locker that day.

The wurse doesn't like them at all. It only has about nine of them. When the bell goes, Elsa hugs it hard, hard, hard one more time and whispers, "Thanks for coming!"