The Waternooses had not come alone. Behind them were at least a dozen people in the head-to-toe yellow suits of the exterminators, and none of them were as small as the tiny one Luca and Alberto had seen in the bathroom. Any one of them was big enough to lift the boys or Curtis right off the floor, and a couple looked ready even to take on Sullivan.
Sullivan placed his formidable bulk between the boys and the approaching exterminators, and roared like a tiger in a cage or an angry elephant seal. He rushed at the oncoming exterminators, and five or six of the yellow-suited figures immediately dogpiled him. For a moment Luca could only watch the fight, transfixed. This was not supposed to happen! They'd tried to plan this so that Sullivan wouldn't get in trouble, and now it looked like he was going to get in more trouble than any of them! What had happened to Louise? Had she gotten out of the factory okay? Because if they caught her in here after she'd already been fired...
A clawed appendage came down on Luca's shoulder, and he shrieked in terror and grabbed Alberto – but it was only Curtis.
"Come on, he'll hold them off, let's go!" Curtis urged.
Luca tore himself away, and he and Alberto ran after Curtis, who went straight for the nearest emergency exit and wrenched the door open. An alarm began to blare and sunshine flooded in, only to be eclipsed by the hulking shape of yet another exterminator. The boys and Curtis scrambled to a halt as this figure ducked through the door, having to bow each of its three heads in turn in order to fit. When they turned to run the other way, an exterminator with a tiny body slung between many long, spider-like legs had stepped into their way.
One of these legs darted out, and the pincer on the end grabbed Luca by the shirt and lifted him off the ground. Then it dashed him onto the metal floor, and two smaller exterminators pinned him down and put cold metal shackles around his wrists. A moment later, Alberto was beside him, also chained up, and then Curtis. A set of keys jangled as they fell out of his fur and tumbled across the floor to land at the feet of a knobby creature with a club on the end of its tail.
This individual, who was wearing a tie, bent down and picked the keys up, examined them for a moment, then scowled.
"Liebermann! So you're the one who keeps taking my keys!" it shouted.
"No! No! I swear, today was the fir..." Curtis began, but an exterminator put a hand over his mouth, shutting him up.
The group fighting Sullivan had him on his knees, and it looked like he would soon be on the floor with the rest of them. Then he seemed to get a second wind. With a snarl, he shoved off the three-headed exterminator, which had been trying to shackle him, and got to his feet. Three-heads staggered backwards and fell against Rocco's door, knocking it out of the clamps holding it.
"Oh, no!" Luca exclaimed, before an exterminator pushed his face against he floor again.
Sullivan knew they needed that door. He moved forwards to see it if it were damaged, but the others exterminators grabbed him from behind. This time, one of them pressed some small object against his neck, which seemed to cause him a lot of pain. Sullivan hollered and his fur fluffed out light a frightened cat's, then he went limp, and the exterminators were able to get big shackles around his wrists and ankles.
At last, all four of them were on the floor, and all that could be heard was the heavy breathing of the exterminators in their suits.
"Mr. Borisov!" said Curtis. "I promise you, everybody borrows your keys! It's not just me!"
The knobbly creature looked around the room. "Do they really?" he asked, suspicious.
"No!" said the nearest monster.
"Never!" another agreed, holding up all three hands.
"I told Lieberman to stop doing it!" a third chimed in.
"Oh, come on, guys!" said Curtis.
The three-headed creature had gotten up, and it picked up Rocco's door. The door looked rather bent, with splinters coming off one edge of it. Luca swallowed. Would it still work?
"Get rid of that," Waternoose ordered. "Everybody, no need to panic. The incursion is handled. You can go back to work. Sawyer will be around with nondisclosure agreements for all of you to sign."
The three-headed exterminator crumpled the door like it was wringing out a wet cloth. The knob fell out, and rolled in a circle on the floor.
Harry scuttled forward with a big smile on his face. "You see, Dad?" he asked. "I told you they'd come back! I told you they needed the door!"
Waternoose ignored his son, and put his fists on his hips to look the four prisoners over critically. "Now," he said, "what are we going to do with you? The two boys from the human world I would have just killed, but now we've got Liebermann and Sullivan involved, and if they vanish they'll be missed. Shame about Sullivan. Your teachers absolutely raved about you, you know that?"
Sullivan scowled.
"Dad," Harry insisted. "Dad, I was right, wasn't I? Wasn't I right?"
"You pipe down," Waternoose told him.
"But I told you that..."
"Shut up!" Waternoose barked. "If you hadn't let them escape from the factory in the first place, we could have handled this days ago and we wouldn't have had all this bad press! Next time, think a little before you go running around trying to be clever!"
Harry stared at him, shocked and frightened.
All around them, other employees were very slowly moving to get things set up again and return to work, but almost all were still watching this spectacle going on in the middle of the room. Waternoose looked around and glared at people.
"What are you all staring at?" he demanded. "Let's see some work. The city needs power!" he punched his palm. "For now, we'll just find somewhere to put these four, and deal with them later."
The exterminators picked up Alberto, Luca, and Curtis bodily off the ground. The one who had Luca and Alberto carried one boy under each arm, while a second, smaller individual slung Curtis over his shoulder like a sack of flour Three people dragged Sullivan to his feet, and he had to shuffle along with his ankles still shackled as they dragged him out of the room following Waternoose.
Harry scuttled beside his father, nervous, but eventually he got up his courage again. "Dad," he said, "I know I screwed up, but I fixed it, right? I told you..."
"Oh, give it a rest, Harry!" groaned Alberto. "Your Dad is never going to be proud of you!"
"Nobody asked you!" Harry told him. "That's not even true. Dad's proud of me. Right, Dad?"
"Go home, Harry," said Waternoose grimly.
"Tell them you're proud of me!" Harry insisted, an edge of desperation in his voice.
"I'll be proud of you when you do something worth being proud of!" snapped Waternoose. "I've been waiting eleven years! Now go home. Your mother and I will discuss your punishment this evening."
Harry stopped. A few seconds went by while he just stood in the middle of the hallway while his father, the exterminators, and the prisoners got further and further ahead. Then he turned and ran.
Luca sniffled. The corners of his eyes were getting sticky from tears he couldn't quite keep in, and he couldn't brush them away or wipe his nose with his hands locked up behind his back. "You shouldn't have said that," he said to Alberto.
"Yeah, I should," Alberto replied. "It's true."
Luca supposed that when it came to Dads who were never happy, Alberto was the one to know.
Waternoose led them through a maze of hallways and down a flight of stairs. Luca wasn't sure if all the twists and turns were necessary or if this were just to confuse them in case they escaped. When they arrived at their destination, however, he decided it had to be the former, because there was no way they were going to escape from here. The basement room they'd been brought to had pipes and wires in the ceiling, and bare concrete on the walls and floors. The floor sloped down to a drain in the back corner, but it was only about ten centimetres square, too small for any but the tiniest of monsters to crawl through. Anyway, the big cage in the middle of the room was metres away from it. The bars were an inch thick.
With a chill, Luca realized this had been here for a long time. It hadn't been built for them, it had been built for something else, possibly much worse. Luca wondered who or what that had been.
They were thrown in one by one. The cage was about as big as an elevator car, and while the elevators here were fairly large, being built to accommodate larger monsters, with Sullivan in there it was still a bit of a squeeze. The door shut with a very final-sounding thunk.
"I'll have to mull this over," said Waternoose. "Write some nice letters to the Sullivan and Liebermann families and tell them how sorry I am about the tragic accident. You two walked right into a slumber party and were overcome by the pack."
"Why don't you just send us home?" Luca asked.
The others all turned their heads to look at him.
"What?" asked Curtis.
"Why would he do that?" Alberto wanted to know.
"Because he's worried we'll tell everybody that humans aren't dangerous," Luca pointed out. "If we go back to our world, we won't be able to do that, and we certainly never want to come back here! You can send Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Liebermann with us, so they can't tell anyone, either. You can think of it as..." what was it the ancient Greeks had used to do? He'd read about it in a book, which had used a specific word for when they made somebody leave a city forever. Luca couldn't remember it, so he substituted a similar one. "Banishment! You can banish us!"
His heart beat hard as he watched Waternoose. It probably wouldn't work, but maybe, just maybe, if the big monster could be made to think of it as a solution rather than another problem...
Waternoose snorted. "Send you back to tell the humans that monsters aren't dangerous? I don't think so. Besides, Liebermann knows the door schedules. He'd be back on the next available shift."
With that, Waternoose and the exterminators left. The lights went out behind them, leaving only a red 'exit' sign above the door. Luca and Alberto could see each other's eyes shining by this feeble illumination. Sullivan's eyes turned out to be similarly reflective, but Curtis' were not. Another book had taught Luca that this was caused by a layer in the back of the eye which reflected light so that creatures like cats, owls, or sea monsters could see in the dark. Apparently only some of the closet monsters could do that.
"I'm sorry," said Luca, into the oppressive silence left by the shutting of the door. "I didn't really think that was going to work, but I had to try."
Alberto's shackles jingled as he shrugged. "I mean, you're the idea man."
"What would we do in the human world, anyway?" Curtis asked.
"We'd find something for you," Luca promised. "We talked about it with Louise. It'd be the same for you. People in Portorosso don't mind sea monsters, so they could get used to you, too."
Sullivan just groaned. "My parents are going to be so disappointed," he said.
"You're worried about your parents?" Curtis asked. "I mean, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's going to murder all four of us."
"They were proud of me! Valedictorian of the scare class, with job offers right out of school," Sullivan said. "I almost didn't talk them out of coming to see me on my first day. I would have died of embarrassment. They're probably wondering why I haven't called yet. I told them I'd phone at lunch every day."
"Are they gonna be mad?" Luca asked.
"No," sighed Sullivan. "Like I said, just disappointed."
Luca nodded. "That's worse."
"I hope Louise got out okay," said Curtis.
"Yeah, me too," Luca sniffled, then perked up a bit, a tiny fire of hope lighting up in his chest. Maybe... maybe Louise could help them. If she were hiding somewhere in the factory and realized they weren't coming back, she could come looking for them. Louise was almost as huge and strong as Sullivan. If she could take the exterminators by surprise, it might just work!
About half an hour later, another group of exterminators came in, dragging Louise. Obviously she had fought – she had a black eye, and one of the exterminators had a sleeve torn off his yellow suit. They stuffed her in the cage with the rest of them, making things even more crowded, and then left once again.
"Ma'am?" Luca asked cautiously.
"Are you okay, Louise?" Curtis wanted to know.
"I'll live," she grumbled.
"What happened?" asked Luca.
"Maureen smuggled me down into the garbage room and told me I could hide out there," Louise told them. "Then the exterminators came looking for me and I had nowhere to go."
Luca hung his head. "I'm sorry."
By the red light of the exit sign, he could see Louise's resigned smile. "What did I tell you about being sorry? It's not your fault."
"It's gotta be somebody's fault," Luca pointed out.
"Then it's Mr. Waternoose's fault," Alberto decided. "He's the one who made a big deal out of things. If not for him we could have just gone home."
There was another long silence then. The one red light in the room kept it from being totally dark, but there were no clocks or even windows to give an indication of time passing. Curtis had been wearing a watch, but he couldn't look at it with his hands locked up behind his back. It seemed like all they could do was sit there, and they didn't even know how long it had been.
Alberto was the first to fall asleep. Sullivan was second, and snorted a bit. Luca decided he might as well shut his own eyes, and leaned against Louise to use her as a pillow. He hoped she wouldn't mind, and it didn't seem like she did – when he woke briefly a little later, he found that she was asleep, too. At least with all these bodies in the small space of the cage, it wasn't cold in here, and leaning on Louise was something like having a dog or cat in bed with him, warm and furry and reassuring. Luca settled down again.
The next time he woke up, he heard a jingling sound.
For a moment he couldn't think what it was, although he knew it was familiar. Then he realized it was the sound of keys. Keys meant somebody was coming in, and somebody coming in might mean Waternoose had decided what to do with them. Suddenly wide awake, Luca sat up and shook Alberto.
"Wake up! Somebody's coming!" he hissed.
"Huh?" asked Curtis, on the other side of Louise, then seemed to hear the noise himself. "Oh, no."
All five of them were awake by the time the door began to open. Sullivan and Louise both stood, awkwardly with their legs still shackled but determined to meet this with whatever show of force they could. Luca, Alberto, and Curtis stayed behind them, but peeked between and around the larger monsters to see what was going on.
The jingling went on as if somebody was trying to find the right key by trying each of several in turn. Then the door creaked open, and several eyes, glowing pink, seemed to check the room out before their owner entered. This small, roundish figure scuttled across the floor towards them, and Luca and Alberto recognized the motion at once. It was Harry.
"What are you doing here?" Alberto hissed at him.
Harry came closer, but stayed just far enough from the bars that nobody inside the cage could reach him. "You said your Dad was terrible, so you left him and found a new Dad," he said to Alberto.
"Yeah, I did," Alberto replied cautiously.
"So we got home and he just yelled at me a bunch more, and then him and Mom had a big fight and he called me a disgrace to the family. And I realized you were right, he's never gonna be proud. So now I'm gonna go find a better Dad in the human world, like you did."
Luca had a feeling that wasn't going to work, but he didn't say so. It would have been nice if Harry's Dad had loved him, but right now they just needed to go home and keep the people who'd helped them out of trouble. When he glanced up at the adults he found them looking skeptical, but none of them said anything, either.
"How are we gonna get there?" Alberto asked. "They broke Rocco's door."
"All doors lead to the human world," said Harry. "We'll just pick one."
Louise's shackles clanked as she tried to gesture, but couldn't. "The one I found you in was fourth shift. I think it was section..." she frowned and looked at Curtis.
"A-113!" he said. "If we can find another door from that sector, it ought to be close."
Luca and Alberto weren't too sure about that. "How big is sector A-113?" Luca asked.
The monsters didn't seem to care. Harry found the right key and opened the door, and then started opening the shackles as the prisoners crawled out one by one. Luca's arms and legs were stiff after being kept in one position for so long, and he had to shake and stomp to get the feeling back into his fingers and toes. Once everyone was free, Harry cracked the door open and peeked outside.
"There's a lot of exterminators wandering around the factory," Harry told them. "Just checking up on things. So we'll have to be really quiet."
"Got it," Alberto promised.
They crept out into the hall and Harry turned left, which turned out to take them to the elevators. These, however, could not be used. There was an exterminator, in his full suit, sitting between the two sets of elevator doors and reading a magazine with a furry monster in a swimsuit on the cover and a tagline promising two, three – even five beautiful faces! Luca remembered how Marie and Jeanette at the school had interacted, and wondered if a monster with five heads had even more trouble agreeing on things. It would be like having four siblings you couldn't get away from.
Harry chose another direction, and they found their way to a set of stairs. Everybody moved softly on all fours to make as little noise as possible as they climbed. The numbers painted on the wall told them when they reached the ground floor. Curtis cracked the door open, then froze as another exterminator walked, by, whistling. Everybody held their breath, but it didn't seem to see them.
"Okay," Curtis whispered. "I know where we are now. The door warehouse is this way."
He took the lead now, escorting the others through the grid of hallways that all looked the same as far as Luca and Alberto could tell. If they heard anyone coming, they would duck into a washroom or down a side hall and let the exterminator or security guard pass. Luca thought he might die of sheer anxiety as they passed through one close call after another, but they finally made it to a set of doors marked warehouse. Maybe they'd used up all their bad luck that morning. Maybe they were going to make it after all.
The doors were, of course, locked.
"All right," said Curtis. "I guess I'm gonna go get Borisov's keys again. Man, he's gonna kill me." He sighed. "We'll need a scream canister too, to activate the door."
"He won't kill you," said Alberto. "You'll be safe in the human world." He and Luca were both sure that, if nothing else, the monsters wouldn't follow them there.
"I don't know if I like that any better," Curtis said, mostly to himself. He slipped away into the dark halls.
It seemed to take a very long time for him to come back, but at least this time there was a clock. It was hung on the wall over the warehouse doors, and showed that it was just after eleven at night. The hands crawled around the face again and again for five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Finally, after a very slow and nerve-wracking twenty-five minutes, Curtis came back looking apologetic. He was carrying one of the yellow canisters, with a gauge on the side indicating it had a little bit left in the bottom, but there was no sign of keys.
"I can't find them in any of the usual spots," he said. "I think he must've taken them home or hidden them after he yelled at me earlier, and I don't want to make too much noise by searching for them."
Sullivan pointed a thumb at the door. "Is this alarmed?"
"Of course it is," said Curtis. "Closet doors are dangerous. In the wrong hands..."
"Then we'll move fast," Sullivan interrupted, and slammed his shoulder into the door.
The first blow bent it, but did not break it. Sullivan backed up and did it again. This time, the doors bowed inwards, opening a crack to show the darkness within. An alarm began blaring. The third time, Louise joined in, and the doors flew open, the hinges screaming as they were torn from the wall. More alarms started to wail, and the lights began to flash red.
"Follow me," Curtis ordered, and dashed in.
Luca, Alberto, and Harry ran after him, with Louise and Sullivan bringing up the rear. The pulsing red lights that went with the alarm made everyone seem to be moving in jerks, and Luca was having trouble seeing where anything was, but Curtis knew the way. He turned right into the A section, and ran down an aisle with doors hung from railings on either side, like shirts in a shop. The numbers above the rails started at A-001, and Luca's heart sank thinking how far they would have to go.
"Second floor!" Curtis said, hurrying up a flight of stairs onto a metal walkway. The numbers at the bottom had been at A-010, but on this level they were at A-110, and Luca felt a little better. Once they'd all reached the top, Sullivan ripped the stairs from the bolts holding them to the walkway, and tossed them to the floor so that anybody following would have to find another way up.
They made it to number 113, and there they paused. It was just one line of doors out of the thousands that were in here, but there were still hundreds of them on the rail. They had no idea where any particular one might take them.
Shouting voices and running footsteps could be heard below. They had to find one.
"Which one?" asked Louise.
Curtis flipped through them. "I don't know. Kids, you got any input?"
Luca followed him down the side walkway, but all the doors looked the same. It looked like they would just have to choose randomly before they ran out of time, and deal with wherever they ended up.
Then something caught Luca's eye. "Stop!" he told Curtis. "That one!"
Louise took the door down from its hook, and Luca grinned at the sight of it.
"That's Dorotea's door from school!" said Luca. "Giulia and I did a group project at her house once. She said she drew on it with crayon when she was little." The stick figures of herself and her dogs that she'd scribbled years ago had been party worn away, but were still identifiable. Exactly as Luca remembered it.
The monsters didn't have time to ask questions. They leaned the door against the walkway railings, and Curtis counted down from three before opening the scream canister at the same time as Louise turned the knob. The sound of a child screaming, distant and tinny from being stored in the can, echoed through the warehouse. Lights flickered above doors that were still on the railings, and Louise opened the door. The other side was almost too bright to look at in the dark warehouse.
"Get in there!" Louise pushed Luca and Alberto in, and Harry after them.
Passing through was a little odd, because of the door leaning at an angle. Louise dropped Luca in as if he were going to fall all the way, but after passing through he suddenly found himself going up before dropping again and landing on the floor with a thump. A moment later Alberto was landing next to him, and they rolled out of the way to make room for the larger monsters as Harry came through.
Harry turned around, and slammed the door.
"Hey! What are you doing?" Luca asked.
"We're almost out of scream anyway," Harry told him. "They're too big, the humans will be too scared of them."
"They helped us! We have to help them!" Luca took the knob while Alberto pushed Harry out of the way, but when they wrenched the door open again, there was nothing on the other side but Dorotea's closet. She'd stuffed a bunch of clothes and toys into it so her parents would think she'd cleaned her room. A couple of these fell out, including a round object that Harry scooped up and looked at.
It was a doll's head. The eyes opened when he held it upright, prompting him to scream and throw it across the room.
"What's wrong with you, stupido?" Alberto demanded, clearly taking some pleasure in using the phrase for its intended purpose. "It's just a toy!"
Then the other door opened. All three turned to see, and found Dorotea's mother, a woman with short dark curls, wearing a polka-dot blouse, standing in bedroom door staring at them. It was hard to say whether she'd noticed Alberto or Luca. Her eyes were fixed on Harry. She stared for half a second, then pulled the door shut with a bang and they heard her footsteps running down the stairs.
"Oh, no," said Luca, and ran to follow her.
Behind him, he could hear Harry shouting at Alberto: "don't close the door! Prop it open!" he was saying. "They can't activate a door if it's open on this end!"
"Signora Molinari!" Luca called out, hurrying down the steps. He followed the woman into the kitchen, where she pulled a telephone book out of a drawer and began madly flipping the pages. Luca ran up on the other side of the counter and put his hands on the book to make her stop. "Signora Molinari, it's me, Luca!" he said. "I go to school with Dorotea, remember?"
She stopped short, staring at him. "Luca? What are you doing here? Don't you and Giulia go home in the summer?"
"We need help," said Luca.
"Of course," Signora Molinari replied, "but you..."
There was a sound on the stairs. Luca and Signora Molinari both looked, in time to see both Alberto and Harry duck out of sight behind the wall that separated them from the kitchen.
"Okay," said Luca. "This is Alberto, he's my friend from Portorosso. Alberto, come out."
Alberto emerged, and gave Signora Molinari a friendly grin as he waved at her. "Hi."
"Yes, you mentioned him," she said.
"And this is Harry," Luca added. "He's, uh... he's the monster who lives in Dorotea's closet. He looks scary, but he's not gonna hurt you."
"Kinda like us," Alberto agreed.
Harry came down the stairs, eyes wide as he looked up at Signora Molinari. Luca had to wonder what he was thinking. He looked awestruck to be here in a human's house, staring up at just one in a whole world of creatures he'd only heard about, but had never seen. Signora Molinari needed a moment to collect herself, and then forced a smile.
"Lovely to meet Luca's friends," she managed.
Luca was thinking as hard as he could, trying to figure out what to do next. Harry couldn't stay here, not any more than he and Alberto could stay in the world of closet monsters. They had to send him home. They also had to find out what had happened to Louise, Curtis, and Sullivan. The adult monsters had only been trying to help, and now they were trapped there and had probably been captured again, at the mercy of Mr. Waternoose and the exterminators. How were they going to do any of that?
At least Luca knew where they were. That was a start. "We need to keep the closet door open so no more monsters can follow us here," he told Signora Molinari. "And then I think we better go back to Portorosso. Can you please call Signora Marcovaldo and tell her we're here and we need help with monster stuff?" Giulia's mother would at least be partly prepared if she heard that.
"Uh, yes. Yes, I can do that," Signora Molinari decided, with a glance at the phone book. Luca carefully removed his hands from it, and the woman closed it and dialed Signora Marcovaldo's number... all while keeping her eyes locked on Harry.
Luca pulled a chair out and sat down at the kitchen table. Alberto sat next to him, and Harry would have joined them but quickly realized that the chair was not designed for his physiology.
"I still can't believe you did that," Alberto told him. "What were you thinking?"
"What do you mean, what was I thinking?" huffed Harry. "You think she'd be calling your friend if those three grownups were here? She'd be calling the police instead."
He might have been right, but Luca came to a much more depressing realization. "He was thinking the same thing I was thinking when I shouted sea monster," he said. In that moment, the only thing Luca had been able to do was try to save himself. He'd thought Alberto had already ruined things for himself, and Luca couldn't end up the same way. It had been the worst thing Luca ever did, and he'd regretted it immediately, but at the moment there'd seemed to be no other way. "He was just scared."
"I was not!" said Harry.
"Hello, Signora Marcovaldo?" Signora Molinari said to the phone. "It's Giada Molinari. My daughter Dorotea goes to school with Luca and Giulia. Um... Luca is here with a couple of friends, and they say they need your help."