Monsters Among Us Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Monica Rodden

  Cover and interior photograph © 2020 by plainpicture/visual2020vision

  Cover background under license from Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Casey Moses

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rodden, Monica, author.

  Title: Monsters among us / Monica Rodden.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Crown Books for Young Readers, [2020] | Audience: Ages 14 & up. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: Recovering at home after a dorm-room rape she can barely remember, Catherine is devastated when a neighbor girl is murdered, and turns to childhood friend, Henry, for help.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019040863 (print) | LCCN 2019040864 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-12586-1 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-12587-8 (library binding) | ISBN 978-0-593-12588-5 (epub)

  Subjects: CYAC: Rape—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Family life—Washington (State)—Fiction. | Washington (State)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R63953 Mon 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.R63953 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780593125885

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to publish books for every reader.

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: The Woods of the Self-Murderers

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two: The Cries of the Harpy

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Part Three: Words and Blood

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Part Four: Shadows and Solid Things

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For those who have met with monsters, and lived.

  And for those who did not: you are more alive, even now, than they ever were.

  May she wake in torment!

  —EMILY BRONTË, WUTHERING HEIGHTS

  Catherine stared out the window of her bedroom and thought about throwing herself out of it.

  She could do it, too. There was a screen, but she could unlatch it, or kick it out the way people did in movies. Or cut through it with a knife the way the serial killers did in movies. She’d crawl out like a cat onto the roof, the tiles hard and gritty under her palms, then she’d stand up, breathe in the gray winter air, and run until that was all there was under her bare feet.

  “Catherine?”

  She turned, dropping her duffel and stepping away from the window. Her mother was in the doorway, all soft blond hair and wide eyes. Her sweater was overlong and swallowed her wrists.

  My mom is smaller than I am, Catherine thought. When did that happen?

  “I wanted to see if you needed anything,” her mother said, taking one small step into the room.

  Catherine shook her head.

  “Your father could have gotten that for you.” A gesture toward the bag at Catherine’s feet.

  Yes, Catherine thought, he could have. But that might have required him to look at her, and he didn’t seem able to do that since she came home. So different from just Thanksgiving break last month, drinking cider on the couch, small dessert plates balanced on their laps, all of them laughing at a car commercial for some reason she couldn’t remember. But now there was something between them all, a wall her mother touched with outstretched fingers, making patting and smoothing motions without actually reaching her. But her father made no attempt at all, seeming grateful, in fact, for the barrier.

  “It’s fine,” Catherine said. “I think I’m going to sleep.”

  “Of course.” Her mother, after a brief hesitation, crossed the room, hands reaching out. A nurse’s hands, slightly rough, used to dealing with emergencies that weren’t her own. “Can I…?”

  “Oh.” Catherine swallowed. “Sure.”

  Her mother hugged her. “I’m so sorry, dear.”

  Catherine nodded against her mother’s neck, her eyes fixed on the flat of her bed, the stark white coverlet, dotted with gold and silver suns, moons, and stars.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  Her mother pulled away, wiping her eyes, which were a little darker blue than Catherine’s. A little more beautiful. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t.”

  Catherine shook her head. “No, it’s just…can you not tell anyone?”

  Her mother stared at her blankly, eyelashes wet.

  “About what happened,” Catherine added unhelpfully.

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “No, I know. I just wanted to—”

  “Right—”

  “I just don’t want to talk about it. Whatever it was.�
��

  “Of course not.” A pause. “Do you remember anything more?”

  “No.”

  Catherine walked toward the bed and crawled under the sheets. They were cold. She made herself smile at her mother.

  “The curtains?” Her mother made to draw them closed.

  “No,” Catherine said, a little too quickly, then—“Sorry. No. Leave them. And the light, too. Please.”

  Her mother left. Catherine turned where she lay and looked out the window. It was a typical Washington afternoon, low gray light and the promise of rain. Trees everywhere, the ones not bare such a lush green they looked painted. She’d been studying William Blake at the university: his poetry and his art. One of his works, a depiction of Dante’s hell, was called The Woods of the Self-Murderers. Suicides were damned to the seventh circle and entombed in trees—trees that Blake drew hunched and brittle-brown, so unlike the tall, healthy ones outside her window. Catherine noticed something in that painting, something you had to look at closely to see: human forms traced inside each trunk. A man was hidden in the right tree, but she had eyes only for the woman on the left, who was trapped upside down, her hair spilling over the roots, her feet lost in the branches above.

  “They are the only souls in hell with no possibility of redemption,” Professor Graham had explained in the dim light of the classroom, the watercolor projected massively on the wall, “as they rejected God’s gift of life.”

  Catherine twisted away from the window now, eyes screwed shut.

  Do you remember anything more?

  I was still, she thought. Couldn’t move. There was laughter. Pain. Like hell.

  Like I deserved it.

  * * *

  —

  She didn’t think she’d slept at all, but when she finally sat up the clock on her nightstand read two in the morning. She got up, wrapped herself in a thick bathrobe, and felt her way along the dark hallway to the stairs. When she reached the kitchen, she flipped the switch that turned on the light just above the sink; turn the other switch and the whole kitchen would light up like a spotlight and there would be no shadows at all.

  She poured herself a glass of water and went onto the porch, but she stilled as soon as she opened the door.

  Her father was sitting on one of the porch rocking chairs, eyes staring out into the darkness.

  “Catherine,” he said, turning to her.

  “I was just getting water.”

  He nodded, leaned back in his chair. “It’s cold.”

  She didn’t know what else to do, so she took a sip of water.

  “Smells like snow, doesn’t it?” he said.

  Catherine had no idea what snow smelled like; it barely snowed at all in West Falls, just a few inches each year. She drank again, trying to drain the glass so she could make an excuse to get more and then go back upstairs.

  Her father looked smaller than usual in the rocking chair, as though he’d lost weight. His dark hair was thinner too, his eyes just as dark behind those wire frames. She remembered seeing a picture of him once without them, when he’d been much younger. She hadn’t recognized him, so straight-backed, his hair thick and glossy. He was the kind of man who looked like he’d been born middle-aged, with glasses and a slightly rounded spine, but then, maybe all children saw their parents like that.

  He taught history at the alternative high school on the edge of town, talking endlessly of wars and commanders and laws created and amended. He even had a table of antiques upstairs, collectables from years of infrequent, all-day auctions, him coming back with wrapped packages, carefully unfurling brown paper at the kitchen table, his eyes alight with excitement. “Your father’s Christmas,” her mother had called it.

  Catherine blinked at the night, trying to get her father into focus. “It’s cold. I think I’ll go back upstairs.”

  He nodded. She heard the creak of the rocking chair. He was right; the air did sort of smell like snow. Or maybe it just felt like snow, a heaviness to the air, a potential energy waiting to fall from the sky.

  * * *

  —

  The facts were these and she was not proud of them.

  One: she’d gone to the party. Sigma something. Maybe a Psi in there as well. Two: her dress was yellow and short and thin cotton that danced when she moved, her blond hair curled at the ends to brush her collarbone. And she did move—three—dancing and spinning. Four: she drank. Cheap boxed wine and then something green-blue that burned. No drugs in the drinks—she thought, then tried not to think about that at all. Just too many of them. Strangely, she felt guiltier for that. So much on her shoulders, her choices all her own.

  Five: blackness.

  Or was that with four? Levels of drinking. All of them wrong but some more wrong than others, like Dante’s circles of hell, a punishment to fit the crime and she was a woman upside down in a tree, damned, her hair tangled in the tree’s roots, all the blood rushing there as though the tree were feeding off her blood instead of rain.

  He fed off her too. She didn’t know who. She didn’t even remember getting to the dorms back on campus, much less who the room belonged to. The one she woke up in hours later, before the sun was up, a dark room with a tall figure standing over her. He’d been hard to see without any lights on and the window showing only a black sky. He was shaking her.

  She tried to push him off, turn over, into the cool covers, but the covers weren’t cool and she smelled smoke and turned the other way, coughing. She shoved at the hand on her.

  “I’m up,” she managed, pulling herself into a sitting position.

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  She wiped her eyes, swallowed. Her throat was so dry it hurt and she wanted to cough but was almost afraid to. “Water,” she said without thinking. Her dress felt twisted around her.

  A sigh. Footsteps. The tall shadow in front of her walked to the other side of the room. She heard a tap run and then shut off seconds later.

  “Here.” A cup in front of her face. She could just make out the edge of the rim. She took the cup, feeling for the first time a shiver of unease, but she was thirsty so she drank. It was just enough for a mouthful.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Where—?” But she broke off. She’d righted herself a little more, shifting against the mattress, and an awareness of her body flung itself into her mind like a blow. She froze where she was, not moving at all, her mouth half open as her lungs inhaled sharply, burning her raw throat, which the water had not helped.

  Fear came like a blackout, sudden and complete. A terror out of nowhere.

  Now she noticed the height of the shadow—person, man, stranger—before her, how he was just inches away, looking down with a featureless face. The cup dropped from her hand and clattered—plastic—onto the floor. She heard every time it hit the floor. Five times, before it rolled away with the sound of grinding pebbles.

  “Get up,” he said.

  She hesitated for a moment, then stood. She tugged at the hem of her dress. The collar felt all wrong, too high against her neck. Backward, she realized. It was on backward.

  Shoes, she thought, because that thought was safe. She felt for them on the floor, crouching like a child. Ankle boots with a low heel. She pulled them on. Her toes hit something hard in the right one. Her cell phone. She took it out and put the shoe on.

  There were other thoughts in her mind—not cell phones and not shoes—struggling to get to the front, but she was stiff-arming them to the back like a no-nonsense hall monitor.

  “Go.”

  She looked at the shadow. She was slick all over, her skin twitching and sweating so much it was like it was trying to slide right off her bones.

  Fear again, breathing at the place behind her ears.

  She went.

  Her sleep was a broken thing she couldn’t put back together. But she did t
ry—over-the-counter sleeping pills: white and chalky. When she went back upstairs after talking to her father, she took one. Then another an hour later, her eyes dazedly scanning the back of the box; what was the max dosage? Did it matter? Her mind was thick with slow thoughts that scraped against the inside of her skull.

  Don’t think.

  I don’t want to think.

  Slowly she fell into blackness and woke coated in a thin sheen of sweat. She smelled. When she sat up she realized she’d kicked the covers off her bed and that the room was lit gold from the sun through the thin, closed curtains. Her clock read three in the afternoon.

  She stayed in bed for two more hours, watching random things on YouTube, letting the next video play without clicking, not even bothering to skip the ads. Her mom came in to check on her. Brought her saltines as though she were recovering from the flu.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  But her mom brought her tea, then ice water, then a small bowl of spaghetti shiny with butter. Catherine ate it while watching a documentary about steroids in the Olympics on Netflix. When she heard her parents’ bedroom door close just after ten, she got out of bed.

  She splashed cold water on her face in the bathroom and saw it catch on her eyelashes. She didn’t recognize the girl looking back at her: a mess, her blond hair dirty, the careful highlights barely noticeable under the grime. She had bruises: one at her neck, another on the inside of her right knee. They seemed to hurt more, the longer she looked at them.