Page 85 of Only a Monster

The room was tiny, with stone walls and a vaulted wooden ceiling.

‘What is this?’ Aaron sounded bewildered.

There was a mattress on the floor with a thin blanket—too thin for this cold stone room. A bucket had been pushed into one corner. A wooden desk was against a wall.

Joan made herself step inside. ‘It’s a prison cell.’ Not the prison from her nightmares, but she knew one when she saw one.

‘But where are all the King’s treasures?’ Aaron said.

Someone had been kept in here. There were brown bloodstains on the edge of the desk. Scuff marks on the stone floor. Someone had put up a fight.

Tom crouched to touch an indentation in the mattress. The mattress was so thin that his knee compressed it to the cold stone floor.

‘Where is everything?’ Aaron said. ‘Where are the books? Where are the records? Where’s the transformatio? Isn’t this supposed to be the Royal Archive?’ He turned to Tom. ‘This is the wrong room.’

‘It’s the right room,’ Tom said. ‘You saw the protections around it.’

‘But there’s nothing in here.’

‘I can see that, can’t I?’ Tom growled. He’d been talking for days about what the room might hold. They say that the King collects treasures from all of time. Now, frustrated, he ripped into the mattress, as if something might be hidden there. When he found nothing, he hurled it against the wall. It hit the bucket, and something disgusting slopped all over the floor.

‘Oh, for—’ Aaron backed up from the spreading mess. ‘Oh, that’s repugnant. Why did you do that? Frankie, no.’ He called the dog back before she could bound over there.

And now Tom was pushing at the walls, apparently hoping to find a hidden door.

‘Tom, stop,’ Joan said. ‘We can see what was in here.’

A person had been here. A prisoner. Someone all alone, cut off from the world, behind a slice of winter from a hundred thousand years ago.

‘For God’s sake,’ Aaron said. He hoisted up Frankie with a grunt, staggering a bit, as if she was much heavier than he’d expected. ‘Come on. There’s nothing here. We need to go.’

But then Joan hesitated. The scuff marks and the blood said there’d been a struggle.

Blood on the corner of the desk and messy scuff marks on the floor beside it. Someone had struggled next to the desk. And, after that, there were long scraped lines all the way to the door, as if the person had stopped struggling. Had they been unconscious? Or had they stopped struggling for a reason? Had they accomplished something near the desk?

On a hunch, Joan bent to run her hand under the desk. An uneven notch had been carved into the wood to create a shallow ledge. There was something in it. Joan had a flash of hope that it might be the transformatio, but even before she’d slid out the object and pocketed it, she knew it wasn’t. It was clear that this room had never held the King’s treasures. And in their research, the transformatio had been described as an ornate golden frame—a doorway.

‘Hey.’ Ruth’s voice sounded from the other side of the moat. The rolled rug connecting the archive to the rest of the palace seemed to shiver right out of existence for a second, leaving an empty expanse of white snow between them and Ruth. The rug reappeared again a moment later.

‘Oh my God,’ Aaron said, voice shaking. He had both arms around Frankie, and he tucked her closer, seeming to need the comfort. ‘What if we get stuck in that time?’

‘Go! While the bridge is still here!’ Joan pushed at Aaron. He went without argument, diving through the tunnel, careful of Frankie. ‘Go!’ Joan said to Tom. He jumped into the tunnel too, and Joan threw herself after him.

The second crossing was more terrifying than the first. One time when Joan blinked, she saw an endless field of snow in front of her instead of Tom’s legs. In the distance, trees rose from the landscape—like great monoliths, stark and leafless against the blue sky. Joan hadn’t known that trees could be so big. The cold hit her belatedly, like a physical blow.

Then the snow and trees were gone. Tom was in front of her again. Joan scrambled after him, and then strong hands were pulling her out—Aaron’s and Tom’s. And just in time. As Joan cleared the barrier, Ruth tottered backward and lost her grip on the rug.

Ruth’s gasping breaths sounded loud in the quiet. ‘Did you find it?’ she managed.

Aaron shook his head. ‘The room was a vacant prison cell. No archive. No treasures.’

Ruth laughed, high, with a note of hysteria. ‘Oh, fuck.’

‘You were right,’ Joan said to her. Ruth had said that there was something wrong. Joan hadn’t known what she’d meant at the time, but she understood it now. She felt it too. ‘There’s something wrong about all of this. I got something wrong.’

‘No time for debriefing,’ Tom said. ‘We have minutes before the new guards arrive.’

‘And look.’ Aaron pointed.

---