There hadn't been any opportunity for the boys to get something to eat that morning, so they had to sit hungry in the bushes beside the driveway until Armstrong the chauffeur brought the very long black car around. Luca and Alberto crept around the far side of it and opened the back door to get in, which Armstrong was not expecting. He yelped, then draped several tentacles over the seat as he turned to see what was going on.
"Just us!" said Alberto, pulling water bottles out from under the little fridge.
"We're waiting for Harry!" Luca added, with his best innocent grin.
"Don't tell Mr. Waternoose," Alberto added.
The octopus raised a shaggy eyebrow. "You boys up to something?" he asked.
"Nothing bad," Luca assured him. He drank some of the water, then poured the rest over his head.
Harry came scuttling out of the house a few minutes later, and climbed into the car. He was relieved to see Luca and Alberto there.
"Oh, good," he said. "When Barbara told me she'd escorted you two out this morning, I was afraid I'd never see you again. We're gonna see those humans today, right?"
"Absolutely," said Alberto with a nod.
Armstrong started the car and headed down the driveway.
"Do you have anything we can eat?" Luca asked. "We didn't have breakfast."
Harry blinked, having apparently not even thought of that. "I've got some candy," he said, and pulled out a bag of suckers. Each one was a different colour of transparent candy, apparently encasing an eyeball on a stick.
"Um." Luca held up his hands. "Candy isn't really breakfast."
"Yeah," Alberto agreed with a grimace.
"More for me," said Harry, putting the candy away again. "You guys can eat at the factory, maybe. Dad poached Chef Skinner from the Avery Hotel downtown for the cafeteria!"
Alberto frowned. "I thought you poached fish, not chefs."
"What?" asked Harry.
Luca had another question. "Why is that part of the house so bare?" he asked.
That made Harry look even more confused. "What part? The servants' quarters?"
"I guess," Luca said. They hadn't been given a name for the place where they'd spent the night. "The rest of the house is so fancy but there's nothing in there."
"People go in the rest of the house," said Harry. "Nobody visits the servants."
So the nicer parts of the house were just for show, Luca thought. It was kind of like a museum. Maybe the family collected furniture and clocks and paintings the same way Signora Lorenzini in Genova collected old cameras, or Old Tommaso in Portorosso had all his fancy fishing flies.
Armstrong dropped them off at the school again. Luca and Alberto thanked him and waved as he drove away, then decided they'd better take the opportunity to get wet in the fountain again. Luca was about to jump in when Alberto grabbed his arm to hold him back.
"What?" asked Luca.
Alberto pointed. The eight-legged girl in the ankh necklace was next to the fountain, picking up pencils that had spilled from her case. They'd already gotten her wet twice by accident, a third time would just be ridiculous. Luca nodded, and the two of them climbed into the water to roll around and soak themselves a little more carefully.
Once the girl began to walk away, they were able to be more rambunctious. Alberto flicked water in Luca's direction, and Luca laughed and splashed back. It soon devolved into a water fight.
"Hey!" somebody shouted. "Tarantella! Wait up!"
The spider girl turned around and smiled. "Bridget!" she said, and ran to meet her friend. "I asked my parents about..."
As she passed the fountain, Alberto's tail threw water right in her face. She blinked a couple of times in surprise.
Alberto gave her a pained smile. "Sorry!"
Tarantella made a wordless growl of anger, grabbed her friend's arm, and stomped off.
Luca climbed back out of the fountain and looked at the other students milling around. It wasn't likely there'd be another tour after they'd just had one yesterday. "How do we get back to the factory?" he asked.
"Easy. The number four bus goes right to it," Harry replied. "We can catch it right up the street, next to the Circle-Klaw."
He showed them the way. The Circle-Klaw was one of a number of little shops in a long, low building on the corner. It seemed to sell mostly candy and newspapers, although there were also things like sandwiches and cigarette lighters and other small gadgets. It looked like a promising place to find something to eat, but Harry stopped Luca and Alberto from going in.
"You'll get better breakfast in the cafeteria," he said. "Anyway, the bus might come while you're in there."
So instead, they sat on a bench outside and waited. This was a risky thing to do – the day and night might be opposite here, but the seasons must have been similar, because the sun was already high and bright in the sky and Luca and Alberto were in serious danger of drying out. With monsters going by both in cars on the road and on foot (or tentacle) on the sidewalk, that would have been a disaster. Luckily, there was a puddle in the car park by the row of shops, and they went and rolled around in that.
Harry watched this with a slightly disgusted frown. "What happens if you guys dry out?" he asked.
"Terrible things," said Alberto. "You wouldn't want to see."
They were good and wet when the bus pulled up, but they were also muddy, with grit in their fins and gills. The latter was very uncomfortable, and Luca had to sit on his hands to keep himself from trying to groom or scratch as they bumped along, not wanting to risk rubbing the water away. Other people riding were giving them disapproving looks, some out of as many as seven eyes.
Apparently almost everybody on the bus was also going to the factory – when it stopped outside the car park, a dozen monsters grabbed jackets and lunch boxes and filed out the door. The boys waited until almost everybody else was gone, and then trooped back out into the sunshine.
As well as being sunny, there was a bit of wind blowing, so they needed to find another water source quickly. There was water in the ditch next to the chain link fence, but that was filthy and full of mosquito larvae, so they chose instead a puddle that had collected in a corner of the car park where the drain was plugged with old leaves. Luca and Alberto went and splashed in that, and it did a bit, though not much, to clean their clothes.
Once satisfactorily damp, they headed for the factory building. Harry happily scuttled right up to the front door, which Luca supposed was fine if his father owned the place – but then he had to step aside as somebody came out.
This was a three-legged, bumblebee-striped creature with two small horns and a thick tail, one Luca and Alberto recognized immediately as Louise. Curtis was trotting alongside her, with file folders under his arms, and the headless blue Steve was right behind them.
"This is totally unfair, Louise. A stain on your reputation!" Steve was saying, but there was a smile on his chest-mounted face.
Louise did not answer.
"You were just at the beginning of your career!" Steve went on, still following as she carried a stack of cardboard boxes across the car park. "Louise! I'm sure there's something we can do about this. Let me talk to the board for you..." he reached for her arm.
She whirled around, nearly smacking him in the face with her boxes. "If I have dinner with you, right?" she demanded.
Steve feigned shock. "You make it sound like I'm holding you hostage!"
She turned her back again and held the boxes up with a knee while she unlocked her car.
"Louise! I'm trying to do you a favour!" said Steve.
"I don't need a favour!" she told him.
"Then enjoy unemployment!" he shouted, fed up, and turned to storm back inside.
Harry and Alberto began to follow Steve into the building, but Luca lingered. Louise was rearranging things in the back of her car, while Curtis handed her folders and boxes. It was obvious what must have happened. Luca took a deep breath, and went up to talk to her.
"Madame?" he asked.
She looked over her shoulder. "Yes? Oh. It's you two. What do you want?" She wasn't angry, but she didn't want them there.
Luca glanced back at Alberto and Harry watching him, then asked, "did you lose your job because of us?"
Louise looked at him for a moment as if not sure what to say, and then she sighed. "No. I lost my job because Steve kicked up a big fuss and refused to take responsibility for it. Don't worry about it."
"We could say something to the board," Luca suggested. He didn't know what that was, but it was apparently important. "We could tell it he just saw us and freaked out for no reason, and then everybody would know it was his fault instead of yours."
Louise shook her head. "Don't bother. You don't need to get involved in this, and it wouldn't help, anyway. It's as much politics as it is anything else." She put the last box in the back seat, straightened up, and closed the car door. "Thanks for your help, Curtis."
"No problem, Louise," the moplike creature replied. "It's been a pleasure working with you. I'm gonna tell this Sullivan guy he's got a big trio of shoes to fill." He shook Louise's hand.
"Thank you, Curtis. He doesn't deserve you," Louise replied. She climbed into her car and started the engine.
"Hey!" Harry called from the factory entrance. "Are you guys coming?"
"Yeah," sighed Luca. "Sorry, I'm on my way."
"What did she say?" Alberto asked as they headed inside.
"She said it's not our fault she lost her job," Luca replied, "but... it kinda is, isn't it? It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been there."
"She's the one who dragged us in here," Alberto said. "Pretty sure that's her fault."
That was one way to look at it, but Luca still felt uneasy.
Harry waved to the receptionist, who waved back with one of several arms but was too focused on paperwork to reply. There were several hallways leading away from the lobby, and Harry chose one at apparent random. Once they were around a corner and out of sight of most people, Harry gestured for Luca and Alberto to huddle around a water fountain with him.
"Okay," he said, as Luca turned the fountain on to splash his face a little. "Where are these humans?"
Luca looked up from the water. "Can't we have breakfast first?" he asked.
"No," said Harry firmly. "You said I'd get to see two humans. Where are they?"
Luca looked at Alberto. Alberto nodded, and took charge. "Funny you should ask – they're right over here!" He grabbed Luca, and dragged him into a janitor's closet. Harry tried to follow, but Alberto held up a hand. "You can't come in yet," he said. "We'll tell the humans you're okay, and then call you."
"Right." Harry folded his arms across his chest and settled down to wait.
Alberto turned on the light and shut the closet door. The space was tiny, full of brooms and buckets and other such things, but there was a little sink in there in case they needed to get wet again in a hurry. Alberto shook the water off, while Luca pulled cloths down from a shelf to dry himself. When both were transformed again, they looked at their reflections in a small shaving mirror that somebody had left propped on the edge of the sink.
They'd looked a mess in their sea monster forms, and their human ones weren't much better. They had smudges of dirt on their faces and arms from rolling in the muddy puddle at the bus stop, and their hair was tousled and dirty. Luca didn't know what monsters found so scary about humans' appearance, but right than he and Alberto looked less intimidating than ever.
"Are we really gonna show him?" he asked.
"Relax," Alberto said. "We'll show him, and then we send him out again, get wet, find Rocco's closet and go home. We're almost there."
Luca nodded reluctantly, and then squared his shoulders. "Okay. Let's get it over with."
"Harry!" Alberto called out. "You can come in now!"
The two of them stood there, feeling very awkward, as the door creaked open. Alberto straightened up with his hands on his hips and attempted a smile, and Luca did his best to imitated the posture. Harry cracked the door a little and peeked in, then opened it further and looked them over with a frown.
"It's just you," he said.
Luca swallowed and looked at Alberto for help.
"Yes! It's us, the humans," Alberto declared.
Harry glared at them. "No, I mean, it's you. Luca and Alberto."
"No, we're not," Alberto insisted. "My name is, uh, Ercole, and this is..." he looked at Luca expectantly. Luca just covered his eyes with one hand.
"I'm not dumb," Harry huffed. "Your voices are the same, and you're wearing the same clothes. How did you do that?"
"We didn't..." Alberto began.
Luca interrupted. "This is what happens when we dry off," he said. There was no point in trying to argue about it.
Harry reached out a cautious hand. "That's why you can live with humans?" he asked.
"Kind of," said Luca.
"They know we're sea monsters," Alberto clarified, "but they don't care."
"Not everybody at my school knows, but the teachers do," said Luca.
"And the humans aren't toxic?" Harry asked. His hand was still out, but he wasn't quite touching either of them.
Luca took the hand and gave it a squeeze – this made Harry flinch, but nothing happened.
"Not at all," Luca said. "What they were saying in school yesterday, about venom or deadly diseases, or shocks or things like that, none of that's true. Humans don't work that way."
For a few more moments Harry just stood there, processing this revelation. Then he grabbed Alberto's hand, too, and pulled them towards the door. "Come on! No... wait. Get wet again!" He let go and pointed to the sink. "We gotta show my Dad!"
Luca and Alberto struggled free. "No, we don't!" said Luca. The last thing he wanted was somebody as terrifying as Mr. Waternoose knowing their secret.
"We gotta get back to our world," Alberto agreed.
"No, no," Harry insisted. "Dad needs to know about this! If humans aren't actually toxic then nobody needs to be scared of them!"
Luca hesitated. Would that mean that humans and monsters could be friends now? It sounded like a good idea, but then where would the monsters get their power, if humans weren't scared enough to scream anymore?
Alberto's mind was already made up. "We kept our end of the deal," he said. "We showed you the humans. Now you keep your part, and show us the way back!"
"You didn't show me any actual humans, you just showed me your human forms. That's different," said Harry. "If you don't come with me, I won't help you find your door, and I'll tell Dad you were sneaking around and scaring his employees! You want to meet him when he's mad at you, or when he's happy?"
Luca had already observed that he wasn't sure Mr. Waternoose had ever been happy in his life, and the idea of him being angry with Luca and Alberto specifically did not bear thinking about. He looked at his friend, and found Alberto looking back helplessly, each hoping the other had a better idea.
Harry knew he'd won – when they turned to him again, the boys found him smiling triumphantly.
With little choice, Luca and Alberto wet themselves down again. Harry watched their transformations, fascinated, but did not ask question. He just took each of them by a wrist and led them to an elevator, which went all the way up to the very peak of Monsters Incorporated's imposing office block.
The top level was almost entirely occupied by Mr. Waternoose's expansive office. The room had tall glass panels separating it from the little hallway with the elevator, and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the sprawling city. There were nice rugs and couches and potted plants, not unlike the ones at the house but more restrained. The impression was not so much of opulence but of order: everything was perfectly symmetrical and impeccably tidy.
Mr. Waternoose was standing behind his desk, shouting at a secretary. The glass muffled his words so they couldn't tell exactly what he was angry about, but his target – a yellow creature with black hair in a short ponytail, stood up on broad tentacles that made her look rather unfortunately like a banana, was cringing and shaking.
Harry hung back, and Luca and Alberto moved behind him as much as his grip on their arms would allow. As they watched, Waternoose turned around and thrust the stinger on the end of his tail into one of the twin potted palms behind his desk. The plant promptly withered, the leaves turning brown and dropping to the floor in a matter of seconds.
Breathing heavily, Waternoose faced the secretary again and said one final thing. She nodded, turned around, and fled to the elevator, throwing the office door open so hard Luca was afraid it would shatter. She took no notice whatsoever of the three boys on the way. As the elevator doors rumbled closed, she could be heard sobbing.
Waternoose looked around for something else to vent his anger on, spotted the twin of the dead plant, and pushed it over. A smaller creature with many millipede-like legs dashed into clean up the mess.
"Maybe now is not a good time," said Luca.
"Yeah. Maybe we should just go," Alberto agreed.
Harry looked unsure for a moment, then turned around and pressed the elevator button again. Unfortunately, only a single elevator went to this top floor, and they would have to wait for it to drop off the banana secretary before it could come back up. Until then, they were trapped with only windows between then and the still furious Mr. Waternoose – and when Luca looked back, his heard dropped as he realized the patriarch was heading for the door, ranting at another employee as he went.
"... and make sure this one has a spine! No more invertebrates!" he was saying, as a creature with two heads held the door for him.
"Yes, Mr. Waternoose!" said the head with one eye. The head with three eyes nodded eagerly.
Waternoose turned towards the elevators, and looked right at Harry, Alberto, and Luca. His bulging eyes narrowed, as if narrowing in on a target.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, stepping closer. He towered over the three boys, and Luca could feel his fin rays standing up straight in terror.
Harry stepped forward and swallowed hard. "Dad," he said, "I know now's not the best time, but we've got something to show you."
"You're supposed to be in school!" Waternoose roared.
"Yeah, but..."
"And you two!" Waternoose rounded on Luca and Alberto, who shrank back in unison. "Stay away from my son! I worked hard to get where I am. I'm not letting him waste the family fortune on favours for money-grubbing nobodies who couldn't scare a butterfly!"
"Dad! We know how to get more scream!" Harry insisted.
That finally seemed to make Hank Waternoose listen. For a moment he looked startled, but then he scoffed. "What would they know about scream?"
Harry stood up a little taller. "You always say that Grandpa founded this company on hard work and entrepreneurial spirit," he said. "Well, I've got some of that right here! This is so good it might be extrapreneurial!"
"I don't think that's a real word," Luca ventured.
Behind them, the green light came on and the bell chimed, and the elevator doors rumbled open. Waternoose herded the three children inside and pressed the button for the ground floor. They began to descend, and Luca swallowed hard. He, Alberto, and Harry were now trapped in a tiny metal room with this huge, terrifying monster.
"What's your idea?" Waternoose asked.
Harry smiled, and played his ace. "Humans aren't dangerous!"
"What?" his father asked.
"They're not! Luca and Alberto know because they live with them!" Harry pointed. "We don't actually need to go to all this trouble to keep them out of our world. We can bring them here and keep them in cages and get scream whenever we want!"
Luca's heart sank right down to his toes and possibly right through the floor. That wasn't at all what he'd been thinking of. Were they going to put Rocco in a cage? Were they going to put him and Alberto in cages?
"You can't do that!" Alberto protested.
"Sure, we can!" Harry replied. "We keep cows for their milk and chickens for their eggs. Why not keep humans for their screams?"
"Harry!" barked Waternoose.
"I can prove it!" Harry went on, determined to tell the entire story. "When they dry out, they turn into humans! That's why they had to stay wet at dinner last night! You'll see in a moment and you can touch them yourself, and then..."
"Harry Waternoose, shut up!"
Harry stopped in mid-sentence, closing his mouth with an audible click of his teeth.
"You idiot," Waternoose growled. "What do you think will happen if people find out you can just walk into the human world?"
"They'll... um... get more energy?" Harry tried. His five eyes darted back and forth, perhaps seeking an escape, perhaps looking for a clue as to what he'd said wrong.
"Yes, they will," said Waternoose. "Everybody will get more energy all by themselves. The economy will collapse. Is that what you want for your grandfather's legacy, Harry? For your family to go broke while everybody has their own private human for a source of scream? Is that why I bought out Hardscrabble and drove Nightmare Corp to bankruptcy? Your grandfather and I put a lot of work into convincing the world that humans are deadly, and I'm not going to let you undo it all with this nonsense!"
Harry lowered himself on his many legs until his body was resting on the floor, cowering in terror. Luca felt his mouth go very dry.
The rest of him was going very dry, too. He could feel the tingle in his fingers and toes as they began to transform. He thrust his hands behind his back to try to hide it, but he knew it was futile. When he looked at Alberto, he, too, was already transforming. Luca then tried Harry, hoping the monster boy would distract his father until the elevator stopped – although what he and Alberto would do then, Luca had no idea.
Harry was no help. He caught Luca's eye, then sucked in a breath and pointed at him. "There! You see? You see?"
Waternoose turned around as the elevator grumbled to a halt, and looked them over slowly and coldly. Luca reached for Alberto and felt around until he found his friend's hand, unwilling to look away from Waternoose in case that spiked tail came down. Alberto's other hand found Luca's shoulder, and they took a step back only to find that the elevator doors were still closed behind their backs.
"Yes, I see," said Waternoose. "Nobody can know. The... evidence... will have to be destroyed."
Light glinted on his stinger as it twitched.
Then a miracle happened, and the elevator doors opened. Luca and Alberto didn't look back. They just ran.
Waiting for the elevator in the hall was a creature that resembled a haystack of orange fur. Next to it was a blue individual with a face in his chest – Steve. He laid eyes on the two boys, screamed again, and leaped at the orange haystack. A pair of arms resembling a bird's legs emerged from the fur and caught him. This left Luca and Alberto a free path down the hallway, and they ran as fast as they could.
It was almost lunchtime, and the hallways were full of people – people who were shouting, diving out of the way, or running as they saw what appeared to be humans in their midst. They needed to somehow hide, and for that, they needed water. A sluglike yellow creature with short, rubbery spikes all over its body was carrying a mop and pulling a bucket of water. When it saw Luca and Alberto it screamed and tried to run, but was not able to move fast, so all it could do was curl up with its arms over its head and say a prayer. The boys snatched up the bucket and poured its contents over themselves, then Alberto threw it back in the direction they'd come before moving on.
This was the first time Luca had looked to see if Waternoose were chasing them, and was horrified to see that he was, the monster's many legs clattering against the floor as he came. He ducked under the thrown bucket and kept coming, and Luca didn't dare look back a second time as they fled.
"Get those kids!" Waternoose ordered. "They're spies!"
Now people were no longer running away from them or spreading panic, but that was almost worse. Hearing Waternoose, a thing like a purple gorilla tried to grab them. They ducked just in time, only to come up against a neon green creature with horns and batlike wings. It tried to catch them in the membranes between its fingers, and they escaped that only to almost run right into the mouth of a pink beast that seemed to be nothing buck teeth and eyes. Alberto kicked it in the chin, which made it bite its tongue. It screamed in pain as the boys scrambled away.
In the chaos, Luca suddenly spied something familiar – a mop of grey fur under a yellow hard hat, with two eyes on stalks sticking out.
"We know that guy!" he exclaimed. Luca pulled Alberto towards the figure. "Sir! Curtis!" That was his name, right? "We need help!"
Curtis turned around, startled. "Oh, it's you kids. What are..."
Luca and Alberto each grabbed one of his arms. These were lilac-coloured, and scaly.
"We gotta get out of here!" Alberto said.
"We need to find Louise!" Luca told him. Louise would know where Rocco's closet door was. She used it all the time.
"Aren't you the kids who lost her job for her?" Curtis asked.
"She said it was Steve's fault, not ours," said Luca.
"Lieberman!" roared Waternoose, pushing his way through the crowd the boys had just scaped. "Give me those kids! Don't listen to a word they say, they're liars!"
Alberto let go of Curtis, took Luca's hand, and they ran again. Curtis turned to shout after them.
"What is going..." he began, then hollered in surprise as Waternoose shoved him into the wall on the way by. "Hey!" Curtis protested as he picked himself up. "This is workplace harrassment!"
Waternoose ignored him and continued his pursuit. His many legs clattered on the tiles, and then one came down in a broken corner and got stuck there. He howled in frustration and yanked it out, but that allowed the boys to get a little further ahead.
The spark of hope this offered burned a little brighter as they saw ahead of them a closed door with an emergency exit sign. That must lead outside! They threw themselves against it, and swung open, sunlight flooding into their faces. It was blinding, almost painful, after the dimmer light indoors, but they couldn't afford to stop. They kept running out into the car park, ignoring the wailing of the alarm they'd set off.
"Get those boys!" roared Waternoose. "Somebody get them!"
They ran between the rows of parked cars, trying to lose him there. After a few moments, Luca realized that over his own desperate heavy breathing, he could no longer hear Waternoose's footsteps. There were voices shouting but they were further away than he expected, almost drowned out by the calling of gulls overhead.
When he dared a look back, he realized that the emergency door was too small to easily admit Waternoose's massive body with its many widely-set legs. He was having to wriggle through piece by piece, with help from his employees, and nobody else could use the door while he did. They were finally gaining on him.
When he dared a look up, he saw that some of the gulls had two heads.
"Water!" Alberto said, and pulled Luca after him. The car park was surrounded by the drainage ditch, which was full of horrible muddy water. It was even worse than the puddle they'd splashed in that morning, but with no other obvious options the boys jumped in anyway. It tasted even worse than it looked, and as Luca had feared, it was full of mosquito larvae and garbage. Even so, they tried not to breath as they crawled along the bottom, trying not to let a single fin protrude, and climbed into the culvert underneath the entrance road. There they huddled, intermittently poking their heads out to breathe clean air instead of filthy water, while Waternoose ordered people to search every car in the lot.
Sounds were muffled in the culvert but they could hear shouts and car doors opening and shutting. Once there was the sound of shattering glass, and in another place it sounded like somebody was picking the vehicles up to look under them before letting them thump back down. Just when they were beginning to think they'd found a safe hiding spot, a voice asked, "do you think they're in the water?"
Luca and Alberto held their breath.
"I don't think so," somebody else said. "I'm amphibious and I wouldn't go in that water. It's gross."
The boys breathed out.
"Oh, yes they would!" shouted Harry.
They sucked the breath back in. Luca almost choked on a dead butterfly that was in the water, and Alberto had to whack him on the back until he coughed it up.
"If they don't stay wet, they change back!" Harry declared. "Even if it's gross they have to be in the water!"
"Snitch!" Alberto muttered.
"Search the ditch," Waternoose ordered. "And drain the wastewater pond."