Dedication
To you, the fabulous one reading this. Remember
(in the words of Oscar Wilde): “To love oneself
is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
—BASIL SYLVESTER
To Basil
(And I am fully aware they are the cowriter
of this book—but they still rock!)
—KEVIN SYLVESTER
Epigraph
He walked by habit across the soft carpeted floor to rattle the brass doorknob and check if it was still locked. But as he reached that last door on the left, he stopped. The door was open, and he was unsure of how to proceed . . .
—H.K. TAYLOR, THE MONSTER’S CASTLE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1: From A to Zed
Chapter 2: The Lair
Chapter 3: Chez Watson
Chapter 4: Putting the Cartography before the Horseradish
Chapter 5: Dinner
Chapter 6: In the Garden
Chapter 7: A Beautiful Friendship
Chapter 8: Road Trip
Chapter 9: Border Cross
Chapter 10: Ice Cream
Chapter 11: Mantua
Chapter 12: Monster Mashed Potatoes
Chapter 13: Putting Camp in Camping
Chapter 14: Weirdos
Chapter 15: Arcadia
Chapter 16: In the Belfry
Chapter 17: Huzzah!
Chapter 18: Wish You Were Here
Chapter 19: We
Chapter 20: Dolly Carton
Chapter 21: Zed-O-Vision
Chapter 22: Historian Hijinks
Chapter 23: Bad News, Okay Grub
Chapter 24: Aloysius
Chapter 25: Happy
Chapter 26: Moonlight
Chapter 27: Truth?
Chapter 28: The Gate
Chapter 29: Consequences
Chapter 30: Lookouts
Chapter 31: The Monster’s Castle
Chapter 32: History
Chapter 33: One Person Alone
Epilogue: One Year Later
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
From A to Zed
The librarian handed me back my card. “Zed. What an interesting name.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I chose it myself.” I lifted my hands to my chin and grinned like I was posing for a picture.
She laughed, and I knew she was cool.
You see, I wasn’t born with the name Zed.
My pronouns are they/them, and that’s an issue for some people.
But for Jan (that’s what the librarian’s name tag read), clearly not a problem.
One more reason to love your local library.
“The computers are over there,” Jan said.
I bowed, gave my best cheesy smile, pocketed the card, turned around . . .
And froze.
Someone was sitting at the computer. My computer.
It was summer, and I’m only allowed time on the family computer for homework.
No school. No homework. No computer.
Also, no smartphone. Mom and Dad have a strict rule: “No screen until you’re sixteen.”
But of course, the library has computers—which is why I was there.
I looked up at the clock. Computer time was assigned in thirty-minute chunks, and the clock read 3:01.
And some kid was still sitting there, typing away.
Grrrrr.
I marched up behind the time thief and coughed. “Ahem.”
No movement.
I coughed louder. “AHEM.”
Nothing.
I growled and tapped the kid on the shoulder.
Finally, he turned around, and I think he was looking at me, but it was hard to tell with all the hair covering his eyes.
I pointed at the clock, tapping my foot impatiently.
His mop of hair was also hiding a set of headphones, which he pushed off his ears. I caught only a quick snippet before he muted whatever he was listening to—it sounded like a cat being tortured. Or maybe more like a loooooong, loud Bride of Frankenstein scream.
“Oh, hey, Zed,” he said in a low voice.
Eek! We knew each other? My mind scanned for recognition.
Gale?
Abe?
I took a stab. “Hey, Dave.”
He blinked. “Gabe.”
Gabe. Right. Darn. “Sorry. Gabe.”
He shrugged. “It’s all good. You waiting for this?”
I nodded. Argh. My brain had blipped again. I hated that. Gabe was in my school, and he lived . . . three houses away? We’d never been friends, but I felt like I should have at least remembered his name. I couldn’t even remember us having a conversation of more than five words.
“I mean, you can call me Dave if you want to.”
“What?” I asked, distracted.
He swiveled in the chair and closed whatever he was working on. Judging by the screaming I’d just heard, it was probably some heavy metal chat room. He stood up, and I quickly jumped into the chair.
“Um, bye?” he said.
I gave a quick wave over my shoulder and got to work.
The keyboard wobbled a bit, and I noticed that someone had put a thick book under it to make it higher. I pulled the book out and turned to ask Gabe if it was his, but he had gone. I set it aside.
I looked at the clock. 3:03. I had twenty-seven minutes left to work on my secret project.
A website now filled the computer screen. It read, “Inside The Monster’s Castle: A fandom site for the greatest book never published.”
About a year ago, I’d come across an article called “The Internet’s Weirdest Literary Conspiracy Theories.” Number eleven was the story of someone named H.K. Taylor. That article led me to this site.
My fingers tingled. I logged on.
USERNAME: @TheFabulousZW
PASSWORD: VampireLove22
A twisted iron gate emerged from a thick fog. I clicked.
The gate creaked open (I quickly hit mute) and revealed a block of text, scrolling like the opening of Star Wars. Even though I’d read the page a thousand times, it still gave me a thrill.
The Monster’s Castle.
A book written by H.K. Taylor.
A book buried by H.K. Taylor.
A book the world could not accept.
I mean, who wouldn’t be hooked already?! But the rest of the story was even cooler.
It all started with a fan letter. It all ended with hurtful words and hate.
Many years ago, an unknown writer named H.K. Taylor sent a fan letter to noted playwright Tremaine Williams.
In the letter, Taylor described the idea for a revolutionary novel.
The Monster’s Castle would be a Gothic romance featuring a vampire and a werewolf, alongside a host of other monsters. Its themes—alienation and fear, love and hope—would speak to those troubled times.
Williams was blown away. “I’ve never seen such a unique and refined voice,” he declared, “and with such a deep understanding of both beauty and horror.”
He immediately arranged a contract with his own publisher, Anderson & Hanson. They paid a huge advance for the time: $100,000.
The publishing world was abuzz. “Nothing is as hot as unknown potential,” A&H said in announcing the deal. “Taylor’s work will amaze the reader!”
But when Taylor delivered the manuscript, there was a problem.
The lovestruck vampire and the werewolf were both men. Another character, a witch, was fr
iends with an anti-American British zombie. The book’s editor demanded a rewrite. “The book, as written, will never sell,” he wrote.
He returned the manuscript with a stack of letters he’d solicited from other editors and writers, who declared the book “degenerate,” “sad,” “scandalous” and, finally, “unreadable.”
Hurt and saddened, Taylor never responded.
The package contained four sample chapters, a cryptic poem, three dried blue rose petals and a note that simply said, “Thank you for all you have done for me. Perhaps, one day, the world will be ready. Until then, I have buried all my beautiful monsters, my hopes and, as you once called it, my ‘rich promise.’ The root of all is hidden here. Signed, H.K. Taylor.”
Taylor was never heard from again. The world forgot about the book.
A&H went out of business.
When Williams died, years later, the package was discovered tucked in the back of a safe in his office. On the brown kraft paper package, he’d scribbled these words: “The book exists. It is out there, somewhere, if I could only crack the code to find the root.”
The code remains unbroken.
The time has come.
The world is ready.
We are the Taylor legion. And our quest is to search for and find The Monster’s Castle.
Those four surviving chapters—wow, they were awesome!
Each focused on a different monster—vampire, werewolf, witch, zombie—who all seemed real to me.
There were epic battles between monsters and humans, but who won?
There was romance, but did the monsters ever find true love?
Since the chapters were only fragments of the manuscript, I had no idea. Finding that manuscript was the only way to get answers. What I did know, however, was that the chapters had already helped me answer questions about myself.
A menu popped up and invited me to “ENTER THE LAIR.”
I took a deep breath. And clicked.
Chapter 2
The Lair
I looked at the site member count.
It was stuck on 35.
Not much of a legion. But an incredibly friendly group. A few, like me, were nonbinary—which was nice—and all were committed.
But the site member count had been at 36 until a couple of weeks ago. That’s when we’d had to kick off some jerk named @RogerStan25. I’d come across his blog—Roger Stan: The Modern Monster Master—in one of my many searches for monster stories with vampires or jackalopes or mermaids.
Except his monster stories were . . . awful. He actually used the line “It was a dark and stormy night” to open a short story he called “Vampira the Vampire.”
“Vampira the Vampire”? I mean, c’mon!
His werewolf in “The Moon Howls at Midnight” was named Wolfy, and he seemed to spend most of his nights sitting on a rock wondering how to catch chickens.
This Roger guy did NOT get monsters at all.
And then came the ultimate crime: he posted a new story called—wait for it—“The Monster’s House.”
He’d lifted all of Taylor’s fragments from the fan site and pretended he wrote them himself.
Plagiarism!
I exposed him to the group. But he wrote one last horrible post before we yanked him, calling us all “freaks and losers without a clue about how the real world works.”
Then—presto!—he was blocked.
I felt rather proud of myself, actually. A vigilant watchdog, unmoving in the face of evil—that’s me, Zed Watson. What kind of dog, you ask? Clearly, a golden retriever with a mix of poodle.
So I was now one of thirty-five, and I was happy.
For the next twenty minutes, I was lost in the site. I read and reread the chapters, the poem and the note from Williams telling the world that he believed Taylor had left a series of coded clues.
One member, @LysanderFang22 (named after the vampire in the surviving chapters), thought the clues referred to the editors and writers who had sent all those cruel letters. But they’d all been old dudes when Taylor sent them the manuscript, and all of them were now dead, including the Anderson & Hanson editor.
If they held some key to the mystery, they were no longer much use.
We all agreed that the poem itself must have some significance.
We’d considered and rejected a number of theories. Did the first letters of each stanza spell out a message? Nope. They spelled M-Y-L-I-E-T-T-H-WH-I-F, and as much as I loved saying that out loud, it wasn’t a real word.
Could it be a Caesar code, where the alphabet shifts and A becomes F, for example? Nope. That also made the poem complete gibberish.
There were some weird words in the poem, but even those didn’t yield any pattern we could make out.
So what clues were hidden in Taylor’s words? We were still looking.
My brain began to spin thinking about it all, so I started a deep dive into the subtopics.
There were also subheadings for each subtopic.
Like . . .
Poem
Poetic Images
Monster References
Ugliness—General
Ugliness—Specific
Other Ugliness Imagery
Flora and Fauna
Hmmm. Someone had recently added a new subheading under the topic of Flora and Fauna (whatever that was).
Flora and Fauna
Places?
I clicked.
It was from @FlorAida. Ugh.
@FlorAida was always posting stuff about flowers in the fragments and the poem.
Taylor liked flowers. So what? No one had ever been able to figure out a pattern in them.
I was usually the only one who even bothered to click on @FlorAida’s notes.
I looked at the clock. I had two minutes left in my block of time.
Fine.
I sighed and started reading.
I looked at the info along the bottom of the screen. The note had been posted an hour or so before. No one had seen it yet, except me.
And then my brain started to explode.
Why?
Because @FlorAida had highlighted something that both Williams and Taylor had said: “The root is hidden here.” But maybe they didn’t mean “root” as in plants or flowers.
It was a play on words.
Root.
Route.
The route is hidden here!
@FlorAida was a genius!
I pulled out my notebook and looked at the poem.
My heart has been taken and buried away
Perhaps to beat another day.
To understand these lines it may be
That you could find it and let me be free.
Like Shakespeare’s lovers of deadly fame
In the company of angels, skulls and names
Look where he fled, a blue Rosaceae sign
I lie, uncaring of passing of time.
Et in Arcadia ego, “there I also dwell”
To help my mistress with her spells
And when the day comes, it’s time to sleep
I fly away with the secrets I keep.
The rallying cry of the soldier, now dead
Lying there with bullets made of lead
I walk the earth, I never rest
A secret bond hidden in my chest.
I thought that I would never care
to smell sweet moonflower in the air
yet in my soul he has lit a spark
that carries me through the dark.
Taylor wanted us to “look” along a “route.”
A
nd the clues were hidden in the poem.
The code was about specific places, and I knew right away—in my heart and in my brain—that to find the book, we needed to go see them, in person!
But what places? I needed a map.
Just as I started searching online for maps, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I looked up.
Some old dude was pointing at the clock.
3:33.
He frowned at me.
“Jeepers!” I said. “Three minutes? Cut me a little slack. I’m on the verge of making history!”
“You’re on the verge of losing your computer privileges if you don’t move,” he said.
I frowned and closed the site, but my mind was still racing.
I needed to get home. But as I stood up, I noticed the book that I’d moved from under the keyboard. I read the title.
Rare Flowers of the Americas.
What the heck?
Chapter 3
Chez Watson
I got home and hopped off my bike. The tips of my fingers were still tingling, and I was breathing hard—and not just from biking so fast.
I couldn’t wait to tell everyone my discovery. I tossed my bike onto the porch and almost tore the screen door off its hinges.
“GUYS!” I yelled, but no one could hear me.
Let me explain.
I am loud.
But even my “GUYS!” was instantly swallowed up by the louder racket of dinner prep chez Watson.
My family is big. Lots of siblings, lots of noise.
And as dinner approaches, the Watson family circle grows and extends like The Blob.
It’s because of my parents. They love to have people over, yes. But my mom and dad also believe that you don’t turn away anyone in need. So we always have this crowd. Kids, neighbors, neighbors’ dogs—you never know who, or what, will show up for dinner on a given night.
On this given night, it sounded like the circus was in town.
When I was a kid, I thought my family was just that big. When I turned ten, I found out that the guy I’d been calling Uncle Amir was not my uncle at all but a longtime family friend.
Dinner was a surreal experience. If you’d asked me yesterday, I probably would have said, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” But today, it was hindering my mission.