Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
How Odd to Know Mr. C.
The Box
Duffy’s Jacket
Homeward Bound
With His Head Tucked Underneath His Arm
Clean as a Whistle
The Language of Blood
Old Glory
The Passing of the Pack
A Blaze of Glory
The Golden Sail
Biscuits of Glory
I, Earthling
The Giant’s Tooth
There’s Nothing Under the Bed
The Stinky Princess
The Japanese Mirror
Am I Blue?
The Metamorphosis of Justin Jones
Permission Acknowledgments
About the Author
Oddly Enough copyright © 1994 by Bruce Coville
Odder Than Ever copyright © 1999 by Bruce Coville
Introduction copyright © 2006 by Jane Yolen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Coville, Bruce.
Odds are good: an Oddly enough and Odder than ever omnibus/Bruce Coville.
p. cm.
Summary: A collection of eighteen previously published short stories featuring such creatures as a ghost, a giant, a unicorn, and a werewolf.
1. Horror tales, American. 2. Children’s stories, American. [1. Horror stories. 2. Short stories.] I. Coville, Bruce. Oddly enough. II. Coville, Bruce. Odder than ever. III. Title: Oddly enough. IV. Title: Odder than ever. V. Title.
PZ7.C8344Odh 2006
[Fic]—dc22 2005050343
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-205716-9 ISBN-10: 0-15-205716-1
Permission acknowledgments begin on [>] and constitute a continuation of the copyright page.
eISBN 978-0-544-63540-1
v1.0315
For Helen Buckley Simkewicz,
who told me I could write when it was the thing
I needed most in the world to hear. Many thanks.
AND
For Dick Decker,
with profound thanks for urging me to stretch
my wings and set sail on uncharted seas.
How Odd to Know Mr. C.
Oddly enough, Bruce Coville and I have been friends for almost thirty years. Thirty odd years. For the first year and a half of our friendship, I spelled his last name wrong and he kindly pointed it out to me again and again until I finally got it right. Not Colville, but Coville. He was so forgiving, I am glad to finally set that record straight.
We have comforted each other through sickness and bad reviews. We have written a book together, edited stories written by the other, dedicated books to each other. Oh yes, and we have tried to open sacred boxes, flown high with the butterflies, cooked magical biscuits, and been chased by monsters out of deep dark woods.
No . . .
Wait . . .
Those are stories. Bruce’s fantasy stories. Only when I read them, they have such a ring of truth that I want them to be real. I want to find a world in which each house has a water room, where a giant’s tongue is “coarse and soggy, like a bed of rain-soaked ferns,” where I can have an annoying brownie to keep my house clean, and where I can turn into a wolf and “hear the voles rustling in the soil beneath me.”
“I desired dragons,” J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote. “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world . . . I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse.”
Bruce Coville knows this deep in his bones. It is what makes his stories so magical. Not the dragons and unicorns and monsters and aliens. That’s only on the outside of any story. But the desire for the unknown, that ache for the great Truth beyond us, the understanding that we are all—as the old song goes—stardust. Such a desire drives his tales. He shows us how inside we are part of a universe that is deeply weirder, deeply odder, and much more beautiful than history and science can tell us.
And he does this while often making us laugh. I dare you to read “Duffy’s Jacket” once or even a dozen times without laughing uproariously at the end. I dare you to read “Am I Blue?” without howling at the villain’s perfect comeuppance. I dare you to keep a straight face when the Kwarkissian class lets out a group fart.
My own personal favorites? “The Box” for its deep beauty, “Duffy’s Jacket” for its sheer cheek, and “Am I Blue?” for its brilliant daring, though I love them all. But, as we like to say in science fiction circles, “YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary,” meaning you will probably have your own favorites. And that’s just fine, too. There’s plenty of Coville magic around. (As long as you spell his name right!)
—JANE YOLEN, PHOENIX FARM, 2005
The Box
Once there was a boy who had a box.
The boy’s name was Michael, and the box was very special because it had been given to him by an angel.
Michael knew it had been an angel because of the huge white wings he wore. So he took very good care of the box, because the angel had asked him to.
And he never, ever opened it.
When Michael’s mother asked him where he had gotten the box, he said, “An angel gave it to me.”
“That’s nice, dear,” she answered, and went back to stirring her cake mix.
Michael carried the box with him wherever he went. He took it to school. He took it out to play. He set it by his place at mealtimes.
After all, he never knew when the angel would come back and ask for it.
The box was very beautiful. It was made of dark wood and carved with strange designs. The carvings were smooth and polished, and they seemed to glow whenever they caught the light. A pair of tiny golden hinges, and a miniature golden latch that Michael never touched, held the cover tight to the body of the box.
Michael loved the way it felt against his fingers.
Sometimes Michael’s friends would tease him about the box.
“Hey, Michael,” they would say. “How come you never come out to play without that box?”
“Because I am taking care of it for an angel,” he would answer. And because this was true, the boys would leave him alone.
At night, before he went to bed, Michael would rub the box with a soft cloth to make it smooth and glossy.
Sometimes when he did this he could hear something moving inside the box.
He wondered how it was that something could stay alive in the box without any food or water.
But he did not open the box. The angel had asked him not to.
One night when he was lying in his bed, Michael heard a voice.
“Give me the box,” it said.
Michael sat up.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am the angel,” said the voice. “I have come for my box.”
“You are not my angel,” shouted Michael. He was beginning to grow frightened.
“Your angel has sent me. Give me the box.”
“No. I can only give it to my angel.”
“Give me the box!”
“No!” cried Michael.
There was a roar, and a rumble of thunder. A cold wind came
shrieking through his bedroom.
“I must have that box!” sobbed the voice, as though its heart was breaking.
“No! No!” cried Michael, and he clutched the box tightly to his chest.
But the voice was gone.
Soon Michael’s mother came in to comfort him, telling him he must have had a bad dream. After a time he stopped crying and went back to sleep.
But he knew the voice had been no dream.
After that night Michael was twice as careful with the box as he had been before. He grew to love it deeply. It reminded him of his angel.
As Michael grew older the box became more of a problem for him.
His teachers began to object to him keeping it constantly at his side or on his desk. One particularly thick and unbending teacher even sent him to the principal. But when Michael told the principal he was taking care of the box for an angel, the principal told Mrs. Jenkins to leave him alone.
When Michael entered junior high he found that the other boys no longer believed him when he told them why he carried the box. He understood that. They had never seen the angel, as he had. Most of the children were so used to the box by now that they ignored it anyway.
But some of the boys began to tease Michael about it.
One day two boys grabbed the box and began a game of keep-away with it, throwing it back and forth above Michael’s head, until one of them dropped it.
It landed with an ugly smack against the concrete.
Michael raced to the box and picked it up. One of the fine corners was smashed flat, and a piece of one of the carvings had broken off.
“I hate you,” he started to scream. But the words choked in his throat, and the hate died within him.
He picked up the box and carried it home. Then he cried for a little while.
The boys were very sorry for what they had done. But they never spoke to Michael after that, and secretly they hated him, because they had done something so mean to him, and he had not gotten mad.
For seven nights after the box was dropped Michael did not hear any noise inside it when he was cleaning it.
He was terrified.
What if everything was ruined? What could he tell the angel? He couldn’t eat or sleep. He refused to go to school. He simply sat beside the box, loving it and caring for it.
On the eighth day he could hear the movements begin once more, louder and stronger than ever.
He sighed, and slept for eighteen hours.
When he entered high school Michael did not go out for sports, because he was not willing to leave the box alone. He certainly could not take it out onto a football field with him.
He began taking art classes instead. He wanted to learn to paint the face of his angel. He tried over and over again, but he could never get the pictures to come out the way he wanted them to.
Everyone else thought they were beautiful.
But they never satisfied Michael.
Whenever Michael went out with a girl she would ask him what he had in the box. When he told her he didn’t know, she would not believe him. So then he would tell her the story of how the angel had given him the box. Then the girl would think he was fooling her. Sometimes a girl would try to open the box when he wasn’t looking.
But Michael always knew, and whenever a girl did this, he would never ask her out again.
Finally Michael found a girl who believed him. When he told her that an angel had given him the box, and that he had to take care of it for him, she nodded her head as if this was the most sensible thing she had ever heard.
Michael showed her the pictures he had painted of his angel.
They fell in love, and after a time they were married.
Things were not so hard for Michael now, because he had someone who loved him to share his problems with.
But it was still not easy to care for the box. When he tried to get a job people would ask him why he carried it, and usually they would laugh at him. More than once he was fired from his work because his boss would get sick of seeing the box and not being able to find out what was in it.
Finally Michael found work as a night custodian. He carried the box in a little knapsack on his back, and did his job so well that no one ever questioned him.
One night Michael was driving to work. It was raining, and very slippery. A car turned in front of him. There was an accident, and both Michael and the box flew out of the car.
When Michael woke up he was in the hospital. The first thing he asked for was his box. But it was not there.
Michael jumped out of bed, and it took three nurses and two doctors to wrestle him back into it. They gave him a shot to make him sleep.
That night, when the hospital was quiet, Michael snuck out of bed and got his clothes.
It was a long way to where he had had the accident, and he had to walk the whole distance. He searched for hours under the light of a bright, full moon, until finally he found the box. It was caked with mud, and another of the beautiful corners had been flattened in. But none of the carvings were broken, and when he held it to his ear, he could hear something moving inside.
When the nurse came to check him in the morning, she found Michael sleeping peacefully, with a dirty box beside him on the bed. She reached out to take it, but his hand wrapped around the box and held it in a grip of steel. He did not even wake up.
Michael would have had a hard time paying the hospital bills. But one day a man came to their house and saw some of his paintings. He asked if he could buy one. Other people heard about them, and before long Michael was selling many paintings. He quit his night job, and began to make his living as an artist.
But he was never able to paint a picture of the angel that looked the way it should.
One night when Michael was almost thirty he heard the voice again.
“Give me the box!” it cried, in tones so strong and stern that Michael was afraid he would obey them.
But he closed his eyes, and in his mind he saw his angel again, with his face so strong and his eyes so full of love, and he paid no attention to the voice at all.
The next morning Michael went to his easel and began to paint. It was the most beautiful picture he had ever made.
But still it did not satisfy him.
The voice came after Michael seven times that year, but he was never tempted to answer it again.
Michael and his wife had two children, and they loved them very much. The children were always curious about the box their father carried, and one day, when Michael was napping, the oldest child tried to open it.
Michael woke and saw what was happening. For the first time in his memory he lost his temper.
He raised his hand to strike his son.
But in the face of his child he suddenly saw the face of the angel he had met only once, so long ago, and the anger died within him.
After that day the children left the box alone.
Time went on. The children grew up and went to their own homes. Michael and his wife grew old. The box suffered another accident or two. It was battered now, and even the careful polishing Michael gave it every night did not hide the fact that the carvings were growing thin from the pressure of his hands against them so many hours a day.
Once, when they were very old, Michael’s wife said to him, “Do you really think the angel will come back for his box?”
“Hush, my darling,” said Michael, putting his finger against her lips.
And she never knew if Michael believed the angel would come back or not.
After a time she grew sick, and died, and Michael was left alone.
Everybody in his town knew who he was, and when he could not hear they called him Crazy Michael, and whirled their fingers around their ears, and whispered that he had carried that box from the time he was eight years old.
Of course nobody really believed such a silly story.
But they all knew Michael was crazy.
Even so, in their hearts they wished they had a secret as enduring
as the one that Crazy Michael carried.
One night, when Michael was almost ninety years old, the angel returned to him and asked for the box.
“Is it really you?” cried Michael. He struggled to his elbows to squint at the face above him. Then he could see that it was indeed the angel, who had not changed a bit in eighty years, while he had grown so old.
“At last,” he said softly. “Where have you been all this time, Angel?”
“I have been working,” said the angel. “And waiting.” He knelt by Michael’s bed. “Have you been faithful?”
“I have,” whispered Michael.
“Give me the box, please.”
Under the pillow, beside his head, the battered box lay waiting. Michael pulled it out and extended it to the angel.
“It is not as beautiful as when you first gave it to me,” he said, lowering his head.
“That does not matter,” said the angel.
He took the box from Michael’s hands. Holding it carefully, he stared at it, as if he could see what was inside. Then he smiled.
“It is almost ready.”
Michael smiled, too. “What is it?” he asked. His face seemed to glow with happiness. “Tell me what it is at last.”
“I cannot,” whispered the angel sadly.
Michael’s smile crumpled. “Then tell me this,” he said after a moment. “Is it important?” His voice was desperate.
“It will change the world,” replied the angel.
Michael leaned back against his pillow. “Then surely I will know what it is when this has come to pass,” he said, smiling once again.
“No. You will not know,” answered the angel.
“But if it is so important that it will change the world, then . . .”
“You have changed the world, Michael. How many people know that?”
Odds Are Good Page 1
