Chapter 17

chapter seventeen Just because I want to go bestiary questing—well, that doesn't mean my buds are with me. They're totally focused on the brain-sucking whatever-it-is and they seem pretty content to ignore the bestiary and watch Alfred all day. But after nearly a week passes with no Shrieking, I convince Quint to pry himself free from his Alfred studying and slap together a few monster-hunting tools. Once June and Dirk get a load of the killer gadgets, they're on board with my craving for heroic questing...

The next week is a whirlwind! A total wind of whirl! Quint keeps building new monster-hunting-and-tracking devices while Dirk, June, and I head out there—on the front lines—documenting and cataloging these beasts. We should call ourselves the Beastie Questers. The Bestiary Questing Monster Busters. Totally lame. Totally love it.

Finding a monster, snapping a photo, watching it and documenting its behavior—you can do all that from a ways away. But getting the ESSENCE—a drop of sweat, a strand of hair—not so easy... We search houses and stores and offices. We open mailboxes and we rummage through garages— any place in Wakefield where there might be some as-yet-undiscovered species of beastie. We even return to the Old South Graveyard, where I recover one of the Hairy Eyeball Monster's quills. Each daily hunt unearths new creatures, both big and small. Literally...

Some of the little guys are actually kind of adorable. We find a whole furry little family of cuteness balls. "Look at 'em!" June says, rubbing one. "They're so fluffy."

Dirk immediately turns into a softy. "Let's take them home with us. They can be friends with Rover!" But as we learn a second later, cute does not necessarily equal friendly. The big monsters—the ones that are just straight-up, like, brutish behemoths—are tougher to deal with. Thankfully, Quint doesn't give us only tracking gadgets. He arms us.

Arms us to the teeth. I even manage to retrieve a T-shirt cannon from the high-school football supply closet. I'm kind of obsessed with T-shirt cannons. I went to a Boston Celtics game once, with an old foster family, and the only thing I remember was that their dancing girls blasted T-shirts up into the stands, like two hundred feet! Quint turns our T-shirt cannon into the Glue Thrower, Goo Slower—and it's big-time helpful when we encounter the big-bellied Blobbulous down by the 7-Eleven.