Scary Out There Read Free Page B

hands behind his back. The question still hung in the room. Next to her, Jake Sieverson, who had a mouth as pink as a girl’s and very blond, very curly hair, was waving a hand, but Mr. Howard’s eyes swept over him.
    â€œNaomi,” he said in a warm, hearty way that was supposed to make her want to share her ideas and opinions. “ You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
    Nim glanced down and shook her head. She did have things on her mind, but she was pretty sure no one wanted to hear about whether or not in-game physics resembled real-world physics, and no, she did not want to tell the class.
    Jake Sieverson made an impatient barking noise and shouted, “Satellite dish!”
    It was totally against the rules on the class conduct sheet,but Mr. Howard didn’t get after him for not waiting to be called on, just nodded and then put them in their lab groups.
    There was chaos as everyone bolted for the back of the room, elbowing one another out of the way. Lenses and mirrors sat in eight identical piles on the back counter. After a minute Nim straggled over to hover around the edges.
    In Vertigo, she’d already be sorting through the lenses, figuring out how to turn the curves and angles into some overpowered ultramagnified death ray. The person with the power was the one who knew the secrets, and in Vertigo, she always knew the secrets.
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    She went home without her French book or her favorite hoodie, without thinking about the blank faced boy who’d stood across the tracks in Subway Run and watched her set up her experimental dog trap.
    The only thing on her mind was the way the Doomsday Glass had revealed its purpose. She’d held the dog in place and made it hers. She’d figured out how to own the very monsters that populated the game. The message from Mr. No One was just some jerk screwing around. It wasn’t that big of a deal. He hadn’t even done anything.
    She saw him again two days later.
    Margaret was at pre-regionals for science olympiad, talking with her fellow aeronautics nerds about gliders, so Nim was by herself. She was hunting wraiths in the Dollhouse, which waswidely understood to be the creepiest, most difficult board in all of Vertigo. Nim and Margaret called it the Escher House because of how the floor plan seemed to twist and fold in on itself, all secret trapdoors and staircases to nowhere and doors that opened on unkillable monsters or portals that plunged you into thorny mazes that were nearly impossible to get out of and sucked your health meter down to nothing.
    It was a baffling death trap, and Nim adored it there.
    Inside, it was ludicrously big—with echoing ceilings and miles of spiral corridors—and home to a pair of ravenous nightmares with tangled black hair and red dresses, who were always stalking you. She and Margaret called them the sisters. They prowled the halls, invisible until they were right next to you, but Nim had figured out a long time ago that—like everything else in Vertigo—there were ways of exploiting the rules.
    Right before the sisters showed up, your vision would flicker blue, a little. It was hard to see if you weren’t looking for it. Nim was always looking. You could see them in reflective surfaces sometimes, and if you hid or ran, they never chased you very far. If you made the mistake of letting them touch you though, they immediately spawned more. It had taken Nim three encounters to figure out that no matter how aggressively they multiplied, there were really only two of them.
    The house itself held just an incredible amount of junk, like a lunatic museum full of tiny, precious artifacts. There was a vast, labyrinthine basement and, under that, a subbasementfull of moldering catacombs and torture devices. There were libraries and ballrooms and a wood paneled study with the taxidermied head of a goblin in a bell jar on the mantelpiece.
    It was one big