Fort Lantern

Part One · The Takeover

The first monster showed up at 4:12 on Saturday afternoon, and it was wearing my dad's bathrobe. It stood in our front yard, eight feet tall and covered in green fuzz, holding our garden hose like a microphone, and its voice rattled the windows. "ATTENTION, HUMANS!" it bellowed. "THIS STREET NOW BELONGS TO THE MONSTERS OF THE STORM DRAIN. PLEASE STAY INSIDE. THANK YOU." Then it burped, said "Pardon me," and stomped away toward the Hendersons' house. My little sister Bea pressed her nose against the window. "Dev," she whispered, "the bathrobe looks good on him." That was the moment I knew that somebody on this street urgently needed a plan.

By five o'clock, Lantern Court was a complete disaster. Phantoms drifted in and out of the mailboxes, and two mummies were playing hopscotch, unraveling a little more with every hop. Somebody had hung a banner across the street that said STAY IN OR ELSE, with an extremely small apology printed underneath. Every grown-up on the block had done exactly what the banner said, which meant locking the doors and hiding under the kitchen table. That left four of us to save the neighborhood: me, Dev Banerjee, a boy with a clipboard; Mags, who could build anything out of anything; her cousin Otis, who was courageous and not much else; and Bea, who was six.

We met in the treehouse, which was the best defensive position on the street, mostly because it was the only one. It had been built three summers ago from old pallets and one very stubborn door. "We need a fort," I said, flipping to a fresh page, and Mags was already tying a rope to a bucket. "Give me twenty minutes," she said. By dark our treehouse had a pulley elevator, a periscope made from a paper-towel tube and two mirrors, soup-can telephones strung all the way to the Hendersons' roof, and a sign that read FORT LANTERN. Bea had added the part about no vegetables.

Plan A was garlic, because everybody knows that monsters hate it, so we loaded Mags's launcher, a leaf blower with a funnel taped to the front, with eighteen cloves and a loaf of garlic bread. A phantom drifted past the fence, and Otis screamed, "FIRE!" The cloves flew, and the phantom wafted right through them, completely unbothered. Then a swamp creature with a nose like a boot stepped out of the shadows, sniffed the air, and sighed happily. "Oh, my favorite," he said, "is this for me?" He ate the bread in one bite, and I crossed out Plan A, which was the first of a great many crossings-out.

Plan B was making a commotion, but when I checked my notes, I realized the monsters were making far more commotion than we were. Plan C was hiding, and Plan D was asking Mr. Plunkett, the grumpiest man on Lantern Court, who lived at number nine and had once confiscated Otis's football for landing on his lawn. "He'll never help," said Mags. "He's the one who wanted our treehouse torn down." "He's also the only grown-up still outside," said Bea, pointing. "Look." Then the streetlights went out, one by one down the block, and something in the storm drain began to hum.

Mr. Plunkett was sitting on his porch in a lawn chair, wearing slippers, with a cup of tea in one hand. Beside him, perched on the railing, was a tall gray monster in a cape that had clearly been sewn back together many times. "More tea, Baron?" asked Mr. Plunkett, and "Thank you, Walter," said the monster, in the voice of someone reading the evening news. Mags grabbed my sleeve so hard that my clipboard dropped out of the tree and landed on the Baron's head with a loud CLONK. Two enormous red eyes turned slowly upward. "Good evening," said the Baron. "I believe you are the people who built the fort."

We climbed down, because climbing down seemed less frightening than being stared at. Up close, Baron Von Gloom was fifteen feet of cape, fangs, and nerves, and he kept twisting a handkerchief between his claws. Mr. Plunkett folded his arms and announced, "Before anyone panics, I have known the Baron since he was a lad, and he put up the banner." "Please do not sound so proud," said the Baron. "We are terribly sorry about the takeover, but it was the only way we could think of to be heard. Nobody ever listens to a monster who says please." Behind him, in the dark, a hundred small lights blinked on. They were eyes.

Part Two · Plan F

Here is what we learned from that long, strange conversation. The monsters of the storm drain had lived under Lantern Court for as long as there had been a Lantern Court, in a dry pipe that ran beneath the street. At night they filled the potholes and kept the streetlights from falling over, and none of them ever wanted a commotion. But last week the town had put in new sprinklers, and the sprinklers had flooded the drain. Now a hundred monsters were soaked to the fur, their beds were floating, and the radio said it would rain all Sunday. "We did not mean to scare anyone," the Baron sniffed, "we simply needed somewhere dry."

Plan E said DEFEAT THE MONSTERS. I crossed it out and wrote HELP THE MONSTERS. Then I wrote HOW? That turned out to be the hard part, because a hundred monsters could not fit in one treehouse, and every house on the street was locked tighter than a jar of pickles. Worse, the grown-ups were still hiding, and the first thing they would do when they came out was scream. A monster who gets shrieked at gets nervous, and nervous monsters trip over things. Then, from far down the street, came a long, ominous rumble.

It was the sprinklers. Every one on Lantern Court had switched on at once, and the drain was filling again. Water burbled out of the gutters, and the swamp creature, whose name turned out to be Gurgle, groaned. "My collection of overdue library books!" he cried, and then he dove into the drain with a splash. "We have to turn off all nine of those sprinklers," said Mags. "Dev, tell me we have a plan." I looked at Otis, at Bea, and at a hundred glowing eyes. "We have the beginning of one," I said, and I asked how long it would take. "Ninety seconds," said Mags, "if I had nine Otises."

So we got nine monsters instead, and Plan F was the best one yet: each monster took one house, and each house had one sprinkler. Mags handed out soup-can phones, and I shouted the countdown from the treehouse as loudly as I could. The mummies unrolled themselves to reach the high valves, and a phantom shut off a sprinkler by floating straight into the pipe. A werewolf named Pickles, who could not stop fetching things, fetched all nine keys in four seconds. "Good boy!" said Bea. "I am an extremely dangerous werewolf," said Pickles, but his tail was wagging, and the water slowed to a trickle, and then it stopped.

Exactly then, the front doors opened, and all along Lantern Court grown-ups peeked out and saw a hundred monsters standing on their lawns, holding wrenches. My mother shrieked, Mrs. Henderson shrieked, and a man at number four shrieked and then fainted onto his own doormat. I felt my whole plan crumble. Then Bea did something none of my plans had ever included. She walked into the middle of the street with her stuffed rabbit under one arm and said, in her small, clear voice, "Everybody please stop, because they fixed the sprinklers, and that is a nice thing." Silence rolled down the block like a ball.

Mr. Plunkett put down his tea and said gruffly, "She's right, you know. I have been serving tea to these old rascals for forty years. They are the reason you have no potholes." It took twenty minutes, one speech, and a very long apology from the Baron, but by midnight Lantern Court had a new set of rules, written on my clipboard and signed by everybody in fur, fangs, or pajamas. The sprinklers would be moved, the monsters would stay in the drain, and the drain would stay dry. In return, there would be a block party every Saturday, with garlic bread. "Extra garlic," called Gurgle, from somewhere underground.

The treehouse is still there, and Mr. Plunkett, who once wanted it torn down, paid for a new roof and a sign that says FORT LANTERN: ALL MONSTERS WELCOME. Every Saturday we host the party, and Bea runs the games, Mags brings new inventions, and Otis gets chased by the mummies, which he says is the best part. I keep the clipboard, and at the bottom of page one, in handwriting that is definitely not mine, somebody has added a last line in careful, tiny claws. It says Plan Z: stay friends, and underneath it, in my own handwriting, I wrote one word. Approved.