Walter squinted at the letters through the paper. It didn’t help that they looked backward to him from this angle. All he could make out was:
After twelve years he’d come to hate those words.
“A rabbit?”
“Admittedly, he was already dead when I found him.”
The rabbit in question sat on the chair between them and seemed not to care that they were talking about it (whether this was because it was dead or a rabbit was unclear).
“A dead rabbit?”
Walter fidgeted; this wasn’t going as planned.
“He can move now.”
Though, again, the rabbit made no effort to prove it.
“Walter, we’ve talked about this.”
“No, we talked about the projector, and the lamp, and the—”
“Inventing.”
He stuttered for answers, though he knew from experience that none was sufficient. He then looked to the rabbit, hoping perhaps he had something to offer. He didn’t.
“But I—”
“No excuses! The last time you brought one of those blasted creations to school, I told you what would happen, and I meant it.”
Walter gulped. Apparently some words were worse than after all.
• • •
Walter sat in the dirt of the vegetable garden, wondering how he could turn the trowel in his hands into an aircraft that could fly him away from there. He constructed three potential possibilities, but none seemed feasible with his mother hovering over him.
“Get it over with, Walter.”
“No, thank you.”
“Now!”
Hadorah pressed her shoe onto the top of the trowel, Walter’s hand still wrapped around it. The point sunk easily into the earth. Walter hesitantly complied, mounding dirt to the side of the growing hole. Hadorah dropped the windup skeleton into the ditch. Walter looked up at her as she stood directly above him, blocking out the sun.
She growled, “Walter—”
Startled by the twitch in her eye, he quickly shoveled, burying the rabbit deep below the cabbage roots.
“Thank you,” she said.
As he continued to dig, her voice cut into him, one jab at a time.
“Only three days until you’re old enough to start taking over for me. You really must stop inventing and get to work in the morgue. It’s time. I won’t always be around, you know.”
He braved a last look at her, but was absorbed by something else.
Floating down from the clouds was a tiny black box, with even tinier helicopter blades spinning round and round. What a strange little thing.
“What are you—” Hadorah turned to look. Walter wanted to distract her, but it was too late.
He knew she wouldn’t like it. Hadorah rarely liked anything—especially anything interesting. Still, he couldn’t stop her from snatching the box just as soon as it was in reach. With a pitiful whine, it popped, leaving her grasping only a letter that had been hidden inside.
Eyes wide, she flipped the letter over and looked closely at a wax seal on the back. Walter jumped up, going to peek, but before he could see anything, she strode to the house with purpose.
“Wait! What is it?” he called after her.
“Nothing.”
“But you have to read it. What if it’s for me—”
“Forget it, Walter. It’s not for you. It’s just junk. Finish and come inside.”
She raced up the steps and slammed the front door. Brow furrowed, Walter stared after her, then slumped back to his place in the dirt.
It was always like this. He never got to see anything interesting, and there was never anything he could do about it. As strong as his curiosity was, his mother’s desire to squelch it was inevitably stronger.
Walter patted the hole and pushed himself up, driving the trowel into the ground for leverage. He stood mechanically, too entangled in his own thoughts to pay much attention to anything else.
A tomato hung from the trowel’s blade as he trudged up to the house. The tomato fell to the ground at the bottom of the porch steps. The spade dripped with red juice.
Then Walter, too, slammed the door.
• • •
Hadorah Mortinson sat at the end of her bed, trying very hard not to think of the letter. She’d put it in the kitchen trash can at once, burying it underneath coffee grounds and banana peels to ensure that Walter wouldn’t locate it. It seemed Flasterborn had found his way through the fog of Moormouth and was crawling back into her life.
She wished she had someone to talk to about this wretched realization, but there was no one. Hadorah hadn’t a single friend in the whole town, and it had been that way since she was only a child.
She’d grown up here, in this place, in this house, in this very bedroom. She surveyed it now. There was almost nothing in it anymore, no pictures, no carpet, no love, just wooden walls and a white bed.
She remembered being a young girl, just Walter’s age, how she’d picked out her first-day-of-school coat, a nice pink one with a white collar. Though her uniform had been black and gray, her mother had insisted that Hadorah never wear black. It had been important for their family not to seem like morticians, because people in Moormouth did not like morticians.
But it had hardly mattered what color her coat was. It never stopped the bullying nor the rumors.
When Hadorah was a child, she sat alone in the back of the schoolroom. No one wanted to sit next to the girl covered in “dead-people germs.” Anne, with her shiny black hair, sat in front of Hadorah. Her dad worked in the floss factory, and everyone liked Anne because she always smelled minty.
Hadorah had tried to be friends with Anne. But the other girl would say the most horrible things, like that Hadorah “smelled of rotten,” and Anne would ask if her hair was red because it was covered in blood. Hadorah soon gave up on Anne, but that didn’t mean Anne gave up on talking about Hadorah.
Every day, Hadorah heard the rumors, murmured all around her. People thought her family did dastardly things just because they were morticians. The kids whispered about how Hadorah’s family cursed the town with fog because of their evilness, how her parents must have been killing people to keep their business intact. Some even claimed that Hadorah and her parents were dead themselves . . . pale ghosts continuing to walk the earth.
Hadorah wasn’t a curse, nor a murderer, nor a ghost, but no one would hear it, because no one liked Hadorah Mortinson.
Well, no one liked Hadorah Mortinson until they met Maxwell Mortinson.
When Hadorah first met him, he was just Maxwell. You see, Max came from an island on the other side of the world, a place where people had only one name. When Hadorah and Max got married, he added the Mortinson on.
Maxwell Mortinson was the first Mortinson that Moormouth liked. Oh, and did they like him. Max was different. He was sunny, and he was kind—nothing like what the town was used to. In fact, just as soon as Max arrived in Moormouth, he began to make it a more pleasant place.
First he devised big vacuums that looked like elephant trunks. They sat on people’s roofs, sucking up the smog. For the first time in a long time, Moormouthians could truly see the sun, and it gave them hope that, perhaps, not everything was so hazy after all.
Then he put together robot arms that worked in the factories. Moormouthians now had to find things to do other than stand by conveyor belts all day. It was frightening at first, but they discovered that they truly . . . enjoyed some things. There were restaurants, and playhouses, and even a door-to-door kazoo salesman (who found he really loved kazoos).
Yes, everyone in Moormouth came to adore the Mortinsons—or, really, one in particular. Life for Hadorah wasn’t nearly so hard then. Anne still didn’t want to be her friend, but at least she had stopped whispering horrible things.
Then Max died, and suddenly the town’s rumors bit back with a force they’d never before known.
People said Hadorah had to have been jealous; she was a witch, a murderer. Th
ey had always known she was one, and now there was proof. Though no one could quite link Hadorah to Max’s strange death, she had been there at the scene of the crime and refused to explain what had happened.
She knew something, but she kept it hidden. That wouldn’t do.
Then the elephant vacuums became clogged up and no one knew how to fix them. The smog returned, causing everyone to become gloomier than ever.
The robot arms slowly went on the fritz, falling limp and useless. People had to return to the factories to keep the businesses running.
Shops closed, theaters were demolished to make way for more factories, and all the kazoos were thrown out.
Things were never the same in Moormouth after Max died, but for Hadorah the town felt just like it always had.
CHAPTER 7
• • •
PUSHING UP PRIMPETS
That night was long and restless for Walter, who could never shake the dreams that plagued him. Though he had a hard time really remembering his father when he was awake, somehow Walter couldn’t stop thinking of him when he was asleep.
Then, when morning came, Walter was reminded of what the true reality was. The disappointment was never worth the fleeting moments of reminiscence.
A series of bangs and rattles made Walter’s eyes shoot open. The sound was caused by the jingling locks as Hadorah rapped on the door. He launched upward, slamming his head against his desk. He liked to sleep under it, in the hopes that he might dream up new inventions. Usually this sleeping arrangement only resulted in a rather large bump on his noggin.
His head throbbing, he whipped around, trying to remember where he was. With a steady breath he realized it was his own room.
His mother’s voice was no-nonsense as it pierced through the door. “Time to get to work!”
Walter slid himself out from under his desk and shot an annoyed glance at the offenders of his alarming wake-up: fifteen varied locks on his door. (They had seemed reasonable at the time.)
He then surveyed his room, if you could call it that. Really it was one huge, constantly moving pile of contraptions.
There were thousands of inventions, and their various parts, scattered about, littering the floor to the point where it could no longer be seen. Everything was there, from a butterfly made of butter knives to a shoe-spoked wheel that constantly ran in circles.
Like an expert alligator hunter, Walter honed in on the pile. He stuck one hand deep in and a moment later pulled out his prey: a palm-size grandfather clock. The hands of the clock were those of an old man, and the pendulum a cane. He read the wrinkly face: five a.m.
“You have fifteen minutes, and then we’re leaving!” his mother yelled.
With a tortured groan Walter dropped the clock back into the mess.
Somewhere, deep in the pile of junk, something mooed.
• • •
Hadorah and Walter stood outside the Primpets’ house, squinting. On the outside it appeared to be perfect in every way, from the doily curtains to the pansy-pocked garden. The idyllic scene was interrupted by shouting from within. Indistinguishable insults were slung back and forth with a viciousness Walter had only ever heard once, the time Ms. Wartlebug played the video reel of a brutal fight between a hippo and a lion (in celebration of her birthday).
Walter and Hadorah stood stock-still out front, wearing identically slack jaws.
Then the side door opened. A ducking spindly figure raced out, screaming voices following her from the house.
“Don’t let her go into the—”
But Walter wasn’t listening, because he was too busy staring at the girl. He’d know her shuffle anywhere.
It was Cordelia.
She stared at him for only a moment. She was clutching a book in her arms, as well as something hidden under her clothes, which was trailing the end of a long rope.
When their eyes met, she darted off into the woods. Walter couldn’t help but stare after her.
Hadorah wrapped her iron grip around his arm, drawing his attention back, her eyes never wavering from the front door. Only a moment later it swung open, causing the mother and son to jump. Standing in the doorframe were two of the smiliest humans Walter had ever seen.
These were the Primpets.
There are some people who smile no matter what, even when their left foot has been bitten off by a hungry, toothy thing. They just hold up their bloody stump, plaster on a big grin, and say, “Well, isn’t that unfortunate? Would anyone like tea?”
For folks like the Primpets, the very worst thing in the entire world is when people suspect that they’re odd.
“Ms. Mortinson! How silly of you to stand outside. Come in! Come in!”
Walter shot a questioning look at Hadorah as the beaming woman shuffled them inside.
“Thank you, Mrs. Primpet.”
Walter knew not to take his eyes off Mrs. Primpet’s. The toothy grin reminded him of something. . . . Oh, yes. It was the very same look the lion gave the hippo before she pounced.
• • •
The Mortinsons and Primpets stared down at Arlo, the ninety-two-year-old patriarch. He looked worse off than he was, which was quite a feat, seeing as he was dead.
Walter traced Arlo’s wrinkles with his gaze, wondering what must have happened to this man that had made him so scrunchy.
Walter was startled out of his pondering when Mrs. Primpet’s still-beaming face looked up suddenly from the body, staring directly into Hadorah.
“So! Need anything else from us?”
Walter was surprised when the voice of his usually unflappable mother wobbled. “We can, uh, wait outside if you two have any last words.”
Mrs. Primpet continued to beam. “Nope, not necessary! Anything else?”
Happiness had rarely frightened Walter so much.
“I suppose not,” Hadorah replied.
With that, the Primpets flounced away, snapping the door shut. Their hurried whispers permeated the walls, just too quiet to make out.
This was a curious place, but Walter decided he would rather keep these curiosities than have them answered.
He turned to the photos that circled the room. They were all of Arlo and depicted each stage of his life. There was a black-and-white one of a baby Arlo wearing some kind of frilly dress (fashion was much odder prior to the invention of color, Walter surmised), and even one of the man as he looked now . . . though noticeably less deceased. Walter was drawn to one photo in particular; it was of Arlo, not too young, not too old, handling a marionette. He looked to be in a state of complete bliss. Next to the picture hung the very same marionette. Walter reached for it—
“Walter!”
He knocked the photo over, causing a domino effect, each picture toppling into the next, all the way around the room until the crashing resulted in a final bang. The last picture smacked to the floor in front of him. The frame shattered, and the photograph floated out—Arlo and his marionette. Walter snatched it up, shoved it into his pocket before his mother could see, and kicked the remnants of the frame under the bed.
A tiny voice rose up through the floor below. “Ms. Mortinson?”
“Everything’s fine!”
Walter’s mother shot him a withering look. “Help. Me.”
Walter glanced back at the frames littering the floor before he hurried over to her. She already had Arlo maneuvered up onto their Flasterbornian Self-Rolling Gurney. Walter was glad for it. He didn’t mind dead bodies so much anymore, but he didn’t fancy getting overly personal with one. He watched the gurney roll from the room, then stop a few moments later.
They’d have to carry it down the stairs.
Walter looked on, uncertain, brow furrowed. His mother stared down at him, a lip curled in poorly restrained amusement at her son’s horrified face.
“Welcome to the family business.”
• • •
Arlo lay on the table, naked save for the sheet draped from his waist down. He didn’t mind his nudit
y so much. There were more pressing matters at the moment, like the woman pressing a needle into his skin.
Hadorah worked slowly, careful to ensure perfection. She hunched over the long, curved needle and thread, sewing with great precision. Walter looked on, the process reminding him of making a teddy bear.
The whole thing made him a bit uneasy, but not for the usual reasons.
He eyed the boring suit hung on a nearby chair. It would be Arlo’s final outfit, and it didn’t seem appropriate. Arlo hadn’t been wearing a drab ensemble like that in any of the pictures Walter had seen. Arlo hadn’t been just a gray old man, so he shouldn’t be destined to lie in a box in a gray old suit.
“He liked puppets.”
Hadorah paused her suturing to look up at her son, an eyebrow raised. “What are you talking about?”
Walter shrank a bit, uncertain now. “I-I-I saw it in pictures; he liked puppets.”
“I see. Good for him.”
Hadorah shrugged it off, returning to her work, but Walter couldn’t help himself.
“Don’t you think it might be nice to give him a puppet or dress him like a puppet or . . .”
Hadorah heaved a sigh, removing the little, round glasses she wore when she worked. “It’s just not how things are done here.”
“Shouldn’t his funeral be about him? What he liked? I don’t think he’d like this at all!”
Hadorah’s voice grew firmer and louder. “No, Walter. We are doing what we always do.”
“But why?”
“Because.”
“But that’s not an answer—”
Hadorah held up a hand, grimacing. “That’s the end of it, Walter. We do it how I say. Do you understand?”
He looked from Arlo to her, grappling internally, before giving a timid nod.
Hadorah lips turned up. “Good. Now, why don’t you try?”
She passed the needle to him. Walter took it, looking less than enthused.
“If I do, can I go to my room?” Walter asked.
The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson Page 3
