by Paul Haven
It wasn't long before West Bubble became the in place to be, and soon large mansions and fancy clubs sprang up all over town.
Everyone who was anyone moved to West Bubble.
Everyone except Skidmore Boddlebrooks.
Skidmore's jealousy grew with each new hit bubble-gum flavor his brother produced, and one day when he couldn't take it anymore, he packed his bags and moved across the bay to a large waterfront home in East Bubble. Skidmore surrounded himself with new friends who all thought Manchester's gum was disgusting and his wacky mansion even worse. Rumor had it they didn't even like baseball.
In the evenings, Skidmore would stand on his porch and watch the fireworks and hear the raucous music wafting over the bay. Manchester always invited his brother to the festivities, but Skidmore never came.
Danny had learned all about the parties and the feud with Skidmore in Manchester Boddlebrooks's biography, By Gum! The Boddle Behind the Bubble, which he'd read three times.
But as he, Molly, and Lucas rode into West Bubble that morning, they saw little left over from the magical days described in the book. In the center of town, an eight-screen cineplex towered over the spot where Bod-dlebrooks's theater once stood. The old zoo had closed down too, and the facade of the pink granite town hall had turned black from pollution and neglect.
When they got to the town's main square, Danny stopped and pulled out the map, which had by now nearly disintegrated in his sweaty back pocket.
“I guess all we have to do is get down to the boardwalk over here,” Danny said, pointing at a dotted line on the map at the edge of the water. “Then we just hop over to Winning-Streak Watermelon Road and we're almost home.”
Molly and Lucas were too tired to do more than grunt.
Danny guided his friends toward the beach. The wide streets were lined with the enormous homes of the past century's rich and famous, but they all seemed to have lost the battle against wind and salt and sand.
The whole place needed a paint job, Danny thought, though the truth was that he, Molly, and Lucas weren't in much better shape.
Danny and Molly were covered in grease from fixing Lucas's bicycle chain nine times, and Molly's long red hair had had a particularly bad reaction to the wind and stress of the highway. She looked as if she'd gotten it stuck in a vacuum cleaner.
The speedometer had fallen off Lucas's bike, and some of the seat stuffing had torn away. Lucas had worked out a way to cycle standing up that spared his behind further bruising, but it meant jerking his bike back and forth underneath him like a joystick and it seemed to require an excessive amount of grunting and grimacing.
The trio got more than a few stares from the West Bubblians who crossed their path, but they didn't care. It was a beautiful summer day, with blue skies and a slight breeze, and they were not at Quincy Park or at the pool or hanging out at someone's apartment.
They were in West Bubble, the farthest any of them had gotten from home on their own power, and they were about to see the Boddlebrooks mansion.
“Danny, I have to hand it to you. My entire body hurts, but this is great!” said Lucas as they pulled onto the boardwalk, their wheels clanking up and down against the wooden planks. Molly was beaming too, taking in the sea air and smiling at the curious townspeople.
At the end of the boardwalk, the three found Winning-Streak Watermelon Road, like the bubble gum, named optimistically by Boddlebrooks himself just before the Sluggers' inaugural year.
They were almost there. According to the map, the Boddlebrooks mansion was about a half mile outside town.
Danny took a deep breath and held it for twenty seconds for good luck, a trick he used whenever a pinch hitter came in with a runner on third base and less than two outs.
Danny's heart was racing and he started pedaling faster and faster. Molly must have been even more excited because she was fifty yards ahead and the gap was growing all the time.
As Danny rounded a bend in the road, he saw Molly pointing to a big wooden sign. Most of the paint had flaked off, and what was left was nearly the same gray color as the weather-beaten signboard, but the words still jumped out:
BODDLEBROOKS MANSION ALL SLUGGERS FANS WELCOME
The sign pointed across the road, to an enormous iron gate that once had been painted watermelon red. The top of the gate arched into a swirling peak where the letters M.B. stood proudly.
Lucas tapped the gate with his front tire and it slowly creaked open, wobbling on its rusty hinges. He looked at Danny and Molly and smiled.
“I'd never believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes,” he said. “We made it!”
Leading away from the gate through high fields of corn was a long gravel drive, flanked by tall privet hedges. The hedges had not been cut in a while, and they had begun to bend inward, so much so that they seemed to be falling in on each other. It gave Danny the feeling he was riding through a tunnel.
He tried to peer around the corners of the winding drive, but the hedges were too tall to see over and too thick to see through.
Danny thought of all the Sluggers fans that must have come down this path. Men like his grandfather and great-grandfather, and boys and girls long since grown who filled a century of stadium seats and suffered a century of sorrows.
Boddlebrooks himself had made his final journey along this drive, followed by thousands of mourners for the tycoon-sized funeral.
Danny read that even President McKinley had come to the mansion for the ceremony. The country came to a standstill for a whole minute on that sad fall day; the only sound from coast to coast was the snap of tens of millions of bubbles blown in solidarity.
Danny, Molly, and Lucas rode on in silence, but the drive seemed to twist and turn endlessly ahead of them.
It felt like an eternity. Danny was just beginning to wonder if they would ever reach the house when the driveway opened like the mouth of a river and the canopy of hedges disappeared from above their heads.
And there it was.
The Boddlebrooks Mansion
“Gosh!” said Lucas.
“Wow!” said Molly.
Danny said nothing. He was speechless.
Standing in front of them, across an overgrown, diamond-shaped lawn, was the most extraordinary building Danny had ever seen. It had four giant turrets, just like a castle, but each one was the shape of a baseball bat soaring into the sky. There were dozens of round windows at the top of the building, each with curved red windowpanes imitating a baseball's stitched double seam. In the center of the mansion was what had to be the most unusual front door ever made, thirty feet high and shaped like two oversized hot dogs standing back to back.
And of course, the building was red.
Not just any red, but the most mind-boggling red the three friends had ever seen. The mansion looked like a giant piece of bubble gum that you could pop right into your mouth—if you had the biggest mouth in the world, that is.
As they rode closer, it became clear that the house was falling apart. The right side had sunk into the ground, making it look as if it were about to slide away from the rest of the mansion, and one of the baseball-bat towers had a long crack that ran down the middle.
It didn't matter to Danny. He thought the place was magnificent.
Molly led the way down a gravel path along the edge of the diamond-shaped lawn to the front door. It was by far the biggest door Danny had ever seen, and certainly the only one shaped like two hot dogs. Danny wished he'd brought a camera so he could show Willie the Hot Dog Man.
“This place is amazing!” Lucas whispered as he stared up at the building.
There were two iron knockers, one on either side of the door, each shaped like an S as in Sluggers, and each about the size of Danny's head. Molly grabbed hold of one and started knocking. Nobody stirred.
“Hello, is anybody home?” Lucas yelled, but still nobody came.
Soon all three of them were banging on the door with all their might, shouting for someone to come and let t
hem in. The banging echoed through the mansion.
“What if nobody is around?” asked Molly after a few minutes. “What if they've already closed the place down?”
That was a possibility Danny had never even contemplated.
“There must be another way in,” he said.
Danny led the others around the side of the great house. There had to be another door or a bell to ring or something.
He stood on tiptoe and peaked in the high windows, but the curtains were drawn and it didn't look as though there were any lights on inside. Danny tried tapping a windowpane with his finger.
“Hello! Hello! Anybody home?” he yelled. But there was not even a hint of movement behind the drapes.
They walked on, peering in all the windows and taking turns shouting out as they went.
“Do you think the hot-air balloon is still on the back lawn?” asked Lucas. “I wonder if the fountain still spouts bubble-gum-flavored soda. Do you think you can just scoop it out and drink it?”
“I bet it would be flat by now,” Molly said.
When they turned the corner to the back of the building, it was clear that there had been no hot-air balloon landings and no bubble-gum parties for some time.
The grass hadn't been cut in years. There were tracks of hedgerows planted in a mazelike pattern, but they were all dead. Cracked red marble steps swept down from the back of the mansion, separating the garden into three descending tiers, each one more overgrown than the next, until they fell off into the sea.
The famous fountain was there, but it was bone dry and cracked. The only sign that it had ever spouted anything at all was a thin pink ring where the water level used to be.
The place looked more like an abandoned lot than a bubble-gum tycoon's backyard, but it was still grand in a sad, forgotten sort of way. It was like finding an archaeological site with the ruins of an ancient civilization, Danny thought.
But what use was it if they couldn't get in?
“Hey, look at that,” Molly said. She pointed up to one of the tall rectangular windows that ran along the back of the house, about six feet off the ground.
“Yeah, it's a window,” Lucas snorted. “There are a million of them.”
“Yes, but this one is open,” she said.
And she was right. Along the bottom of the window was a thin, dark crack.
“Okay, that's our ticket in,” Lucas said. “Molly, if Danny and I give you a boost, do you think you could push the window up a foot or two?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Molly said before catching herself. “But isn't this, like, illegal?”
Lucas looked exasperated.
“You're such a Goody Two-Shoes,” he said, lacing his hands together with Danny's to make a human step stool.
“We're not going to take anything,” Lucas continued. “We're just going to have a look around. Don't you think we deserve a look around?”
Molly shrugged.
“I've got to get some more normal friends,” she said, but she clambered up on their hands anyway.
Molly pushed up on the window with both arms and Danny strained to keep his hands in place. The window inched up a fraction.
She pushed again. Nothing.
“It's like trying to lift a car,” Molly sputtered, her face about as red as the mansion. Lucas and Danny were grimacing too.
“Give it some muscle,” Lucas said.
“I'm trying,” Molly shouted back.
“What are you kids doing?” a voice hissed from behind them.
Danny was horrified to see a shadow creeping up the wall.
Molly shrieked and Lucas and Danny both staggered back, leaving her hanging from the window ledge, her feet dangling about a foot off the ground.
Danny and Lucas turned slowly, and when they did, they found themselves face to face with the oldest, most wrinkled man they'd ever seen. He was bent over a rounded wooden cane and had patches of white whiskers sprouting out of his face. He must have been tall once, but now he was so stooped he had to tilt his head up to talk to them.
“You there, how did you get back here? What are you doing with my window?” the man continued, one of his milky eyes fixed firmly on Danny, the other wandering frighteningly off to the right. “There are no visitors allowed back here without me.”
Danny tried to speak but nothing came out. He couldn't stop staring at the old man's scary wobbling eyes. Lucas was doing little better, managing a few squeaking sounds.
Molly had lowered herself from the window ledge and was the first one to actually formulate a word.
“Uh,” she said nervously.
It was something, at least.
“We, ah … Well, sir, we didn't mean any harm,” she went on. Danny and Lucas were staring at her in silent admiration, one nodding in agreement and the other shaking his head no. “We didn't think anyone was here. We knocked on the front door.”
One of the old man's eyes was focused on the open window, while the other scanned the terrified faces.
“Well, I'm here. I'm always here! And you can't just go marching around willy-nilly wherever you choose,” he snapped.
“No, sir,” said Molly. “We were just leaving, actually.”
But the old man didn't seem to hear her.
“Anyway, I imagine you've come to look at the mansion,” he said, his voice softening into a hoarse croak. “I guess there's no harm in that. We don't get too many visitors these days.”
Molly looked at Lucas and Lucas looked at Danny. Danny shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
“Come with me,” said the old man. “The tour starts at the front.”
Old Man in an Old House
The man walked briskly for someone his age. In fact, it occurred to Danny that he had never seen anyone that ancient walking at all.
The old man led the group back around to the front door. He put his cane aside and reached into the pocket of his baggy pants, one eye cast downward and the other looking straight ahead at the giant keyhole. After fumbling around for a minute, he pulled out a long iron skeleton key, the kind Danny thought pirates might use to open treasure chests.
He turned the key with a hollow clank and the heavy wooden door creaked open. Danny felt a rush of cold air across the threshold as he followed the old man inside, and Lucas and Molly pushed in behind them.
They found themselves in a cavernous hallway, as grand as you would expect any room behind a thirty-foot-tall door to be. The ceiling was so high Danny wondered if he would be able to hit it if he threw a ball into the air. The base of the walls was made of intricately carved mahogany panels. Higher up, the panels gave way to a deep ruby red wallpaper, covered almost entirely by old photographs and oil paintings, including a life-sized painting of a young Manchester Boddle-brooks standing next to a horse.
On either side, a marble staircase swept up to the second floor, and tucked beneath them was a wide double door.
The old man put the key back in his pocket, turned around, and set his gaze on the three children in front of him, who were standing so close together in the middle of the room they were practically on each other's feet.
“The name is Seymour Sycamore,” he wheezed, leaning on his cane. “And I've been takin' care of the Boddlebrooks home for decades.
“I know every inch of these grounds,” he said. “The house comprises 127 rooms in all and it sleeps 118 adults and 34 children comfortably. It takes 1,500 lightbulbs to light the place. There are seven miles of carpets, and if you stripped off all the wallpaper and laid it end to end, it would stretch from here to Paris, France.”
Mr. Sycamore looked Danny, Molly, and Lucas in the eyes for emphasis before he went on.
“There's the ballroom, a billiard room, a popcorn room, the kitchen. And then of course the bedrooms. Fifty-two of them in all, you know? Now, what would you like to see first?”
“We wouldn't want to trouble you,” Danny said. “We could just show ourselves around.”
“Nonsense!” hissed Mr.
Sycamore, swiveling his head up to look at Danny. “Nobody shows themselves around.
“And besides,” he said sadly. “We haven't had any visitors since they closed the place for renovations a number of years back. This may be my last chance to do this. They're tearing the place down, did you hear? People have no respect for history these days!”
“That's why we're here!” Danny shouted, gaining a bit of confidence. “We want to save the mansion.”
“Oh, young fella, I'm afraid that's impossible,” the old man said, one eye on Danny and the other twinkling up at the Boddlebrooks painting on the wall above his head. “They've signed all the paperwork. It's just a matter of time. Why, this mansion and me, we're both on our last legs. Anyway, I'll show you around the place while there's still a place to show.”
Mr. Sycamore led them through the double door under the stairs and down a short hallway to the next room. He threw open the doors with a flourish, and Danny had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
The room was even bigger than the one they'd come from, with dark walls and a glittering chandelier that was about the size of Danny's bedroom at home. All around the room was a wooden walkway, which they were standing on, and in the middle was a brass popcorn machine about the size of a car.
Millions upon millions of fluffy popcorn kernels littered the floor, an ocean of popcorn that came right up to Danny's chest. Danny glanced up at four copper chutes that came down from the walls above their heads and stretched into the center of the room.
“That's where the butter comes out,” explained Mr. Sycamore.
“Wow!” said Lucas.
Danny reached out and grabbed some popcorn and stuck it in his mouth. He realized immediately that it was a bad idea.
