Monstrous Beauty by Elizabeth Fama Read Free Book Online Page A

her.
    “I hide my treasures here,” Linnie said in a hushed voice. “No one goes inside the tombs anymore.”
    There was no padlock, just a large sliding bolt at the bottom of the door that was jammed deep into the ground. Hester tried to tug the bolt up, but it was tightly wedged in the packed, dry dirt.
    “Hold the ivy so it won’t catch my hair,” Linnie said.
    She lifted the bolt with little effort. She opened the door a crack and reached inside, bringing out a dusty, decrepit Bible, which she passed to Hester. The dank smell of mildew and earth wafted up from the book and pinched the back of Hester’s nose.
    “Now, I dare you to go in the church,” Linnie said, forcing the iron door shut and pushing the bolt back into place. Hester let the ivy fall, and the tomb disappeared again, in full sight.
    “Okay,” Hester said, wondering if she had been tricked into the dare. “But if I get in trouble, you have to tell them it was your idea. Promise?”
    Linnie’s eyebrows furrowed with worry, and she shook her head. “I can’t promise that.”
    Hester held the Bible out to her. “Then I won’t do it.”
    Linnie’s eyes darted toward the door of the church. Hester shifted on her feet.
    “No, wait.” Linnie looked back at her. “I promise.”
    “Cross your heart and hope to die? Stick a needle in your eye?”
    “That’s awful!”
    “You have to do it.”
    “Stick a needle in my eye?”
    “No.” Hester laughed. She lifted Linnie’s pale hand by the index finger and brought it to her chest. “Cross your heart, dummy.”
    With Linnie peeking from behind a tombstone, Hester tiptoed into the church. She went into the cool sanctuary and sat in one of the pews. There wasn’t a sound other than the rustling of her own clothes as she moved—a noise that was amplified by the still air and stone walls, making her feel like she was the only person on earth. The Bibles in the racks on the pews had bright green fake-leather covers, with shiny gold lettering. Her own was black, with cracked leather peeling away from the corners, exposing damp, splayed layers of binder’s board underneath. She opened the ruined Bible on her lap and then dropped it with a cry.
    It was teeming with insects. Their segmented, fishlike bodies writhed in a silvery-blue mass. There were no pages left in the book: what was once paper was now a pile of silverfish, engaged in horrific stages of fighting—or mating. The mass rose and billowed and overflowed, an undulating ocean of squirming bodies and trembling antennae. Hester stood on the bench screaming as the silverfish fanned out from the floor upward in numbers impossible from one small book—hundreds of thousands of insects—swarming the pews and invading the newer Bibles. She leaped into the aisle and ran toward the back door of the church, her heart beating fast, her stomach feeling sick.
    Just as she reached the exit, a pastor blocked her way.
    “Don’t go,” he said huskily, putting his hands on the doorjamb.
    Hester squeezed her eyes shut and ducked under his left arm, pushing his jacket flap aside and ramming past him to sunlight and freedom. When she reached the stairs she took them up and over the hill, two by two, toward the west exit of the cemetery, glancing back only once. From the darkened doorway she heard him shout, “Hester, please!” as she crested the hill and disappeared on the other side.
    Linnie was nowhere in sight, even though she had crossed her heart.
    Hester ran home, out of breath, brushing tickling phantom silverfish off her arms, swearing that she’d never be friends with Linnie again, not in a million years.
    *   *   *
    Hester uncovered her face and rubbed it. She hadn’t thought of Linnie in ages. She had never seen her again after that day. She’d changed her walking route home from school to avoid Burial Hill, and her family had stopped going to church for a decade—until Nancy had recently declared it necessary to tame Sam before he