The Tell-Tale Start

by Gordon McAlpine

  In the distance, the boys had spied a shopping center. They saw the signs for a giant electronics store, a giant sporting-goods store, a giant toy store, and, most important, a giant bookstore with escalators, a DVD section, a café, and many books, including the entire sixty-two-volume True Stories of Horror series—or so they hoped.

  “Pull over, Uncle Jack. We need more books,” Allan said.

  Uncle Jack’s eyes remained focused on the road ahead. “Why don’t you two just trade books with each other?”

  The boys rolled their eyes.

  “Actually, I could use a bathroom break, Jack,” Aunt Judith said.

  Uncle Jack nodded and got off at the next exit. “Fifteen minutes,” he said as he parked.

  Once inside the bookstore, Aunt Judith bee-lined for the women’s restroom, Uncle Jack headed for the magazines, and the boys went to the information desk, where a tall blonde woman (nametag: Jeanine) tapped on a keyboard. When she turned to look at the boys, she took off her jeweled reading glasses, letting them drop and dangle from the equally jeweled chain around her neck.

  “Hey, you two are twins,” she said.

  Allan and Edgar did not dignify the comment with an answer. “Do you have the True Stories of Horror series, specifically numbers twenty-four through—”

  “And hey,” she continued, “you look just like that famous writer.”

  This happened from time to time.

  “You know the one,” she continued, pointing to the poster-sized caricatures of famous writers that hung on the walls of the giant store.

  Though the boys were eager to get their hands on the new books, they couldn’t pass up an opportunity for a little fun. “William Shakespeare?” Edgar suggested.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Walt Whitman?” Allan inquired.

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said, turning to the bearded caricature of Whitman on the wall above the literature section. “Wait, no. It’s somebody else.”

  “Emily Dickinson,” Allan suggested innocently.

  Shakespeare

  Whitman

  Dickinson

  “No, I’m not kidding, boys. You two look like, hmmm…” She turned and scanned the caricatures on the opposite wall. “There he is! Up there. Edgar Allan Poe.”

  She turned back to the boys. “Wasn’t he the horror one?”

  Edgar nodded. “‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’”

  “‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” Allan added.

  “‘The Premature Burial,’” Edgar continued.

  “‘The Masque of the Red Death.’”

  Jeanine made a face. “Oh, I read those stories in high school. I didn’t like them. They were too…” She searched for the word.

  “Too scary?” Allan suggested.

  “No. They were too…” At last, she found it: “Unrealistic.”

  The boys were shocked. Unrealistic? Who was this woman to criticize their great-great-great-great granduncle?

  “I like stories that are more real,” she continued. “I mean, all that horror stuff…those dark and stormy nights, interrupted only by flashes of lightning and screaming? Come on, that never happens.”

  The boys’ eyes burned into her. “You don’t believe in dark and stormy nights, interrupted by flashes of lightning and screaming?”

  “Well, I’ve never seen one.”

  Edgar and Allan looked around the store—neither Uncle Jack nor Aunt Judith was anywhere to be seen. Identically wicked grins spread across their faces

  “May I see that computer keyboard?” Edgar asked.

  She shook her head. “That’s against the rules.”

  “It’s not like we’re asking for your password to operate it,” Allan said reassuringly.

  “We just want to see it.”

  She smirked, turning the keyboard around on the counter. “If you two can guess my password, go for it.”

  Big mistake.

  For Edgar and Allan, passwords existed only to be passed by. They cracked their knuckles, masters of making computers do their bidding. They typed a four-handed series of commands (both tap-tap-tapping at once on the keyboard), which injected into the cyber world their wickedly playful imaginations. Of course, they did so strictly for the sake of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s literary reputation.

  After a moment: ZAP!

  The boys stepped away from the keyboard, their hair standing on end as the massive bookstore suddenly filled with static electricity.

  The lights flickered. “Hey, what’s happening?” Jeanine asked.

  The lights went out, sending the vast building into almost total darkness.

  Then there was a flash and a boom, like lightning and thunder—but indoors. Was this a meteorological miracle? No, it was a set of ceiling lights flashing on for a split second with such an intense brightness that the bulbs blew out—boom! Then another set and another, exploding in flashes and bursts.

  It wasn’t quite lightning and thunder. But it seemed like the storm of the century.

  The escalators started moving at three times their normal speed, changing directions every ten feet. Ten feet up, ten feet down, ten feet up, ten feet down…up, down, up, down, up, down. Those customers who were trapped on the terrifying thrill ride could only hold tight to the handrails, their bloodcurdling shrieks slicing through the darkened store.

  Meantime, the espresso machines in the café started steaming crazily, hissing like dragons. Cash-register drawers rattled open and closed and credit-card machines beeped and whined like demons. Screaming voices came from more than just those trapped on the lunatic escalators.

  Darkness, lightning, screaming…

  After sixty seconds, the backup lights came on and everything returned to normal—except, of course, for the customers and employees. Many of them still cowered on the ground between the bookshelves. And no one was more frightened than Jeanine, who’d crumpled behind her information desk.

  Sometimes defending great literature required extreme measures.

  The twins leaned over the counter.

  Jeanine remained crouched on the floor, her hands covering her head.

  “What do you think now of the darkness and lightning and screaming in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories?” Edgar asked, his static-electrified hair still standing on end.

  She looked up and tried to rise, but her legs were shaking too much.

  “Do you still think they’re ‘unrealistic’?” Allan inquired.

  Unable to speak, she meekly shook her head no.

  The twins went behind the counter and helped her up, placing her shaky hands on the counter so she could balance herself.

  “Jeanine, you don’t have to look up those books for us,” Edgar said.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t touch that computer for a few minutes,” Allan added as they walked away.

  A five-year-old boy carrying a Dr. Seuss book tugged with his free hand on Edgar’s arm.

  The twins turned to him.

  “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” the kindergartner said, grinning as wide as a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Glad you liked it,” they answered, patting him on the head.

  Moments later, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith found their nephews in the Horror section.

  “Did you two do that?” Uncle Jack demanded, walking up behind them.

  “Do what?” the pair asked innocently.

  Uncle Jack started rolling up his sleeves and fixed them with his most stern expression (which they rated a mere 3.5 on their 1 to 10 “sternness” scale). “Boys, I wasn’t born yesterday,” he said. “Don’t deny it.”

  “OK, we don’t deny it,” Edgar said, looking around the wrecked bookstore.

  “But you should be pleased with us, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith,” Allan said. “You’re always talking about the value of education. Well, today we taught a bookseller a valuable lesson about literature.”

  “There’ll be no new books for you today,” Uncle Jack announced as he steered them
out of the store.

  “What?” they moaned. (The truth was, while reprogramming the computer, they’d checked the inventory and discovered the store was out of the books they wanted. But they kept this news to themselves.) They looked at each other, their eyes puppylike and sad. “No True Stories of Horror?” they muttered. “Gee, Uncle Jack. You’re so mean.”

  Uncle Jack stood a little taller and nodded as he held open the door for his wife and nephews. “You got that right. Now, how about some lunch?”

  “Chinese?” Allan suggested.

  “Why not?” Now that Uncle Jack had been “stern” enough, he could afford to be generous.

  Chinese was the twins’ favorite, not so much for the food but the fortune cookies. Or rather, the fortunes inside the cookies.

  The Poe family walked across the parking lot to the Jade Dragon. There, they ordered spicy-hot beef, orange chicken, fried rice, and the Buddhist’s Delight vegetable plate. The food proved forgettable. But the identical message each boy discovered in his fortune cookie proved otherwise:

  Of course, that meant the Gale Farm and OZitorium.

  Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith received ordinary fortune cookie fortunes: “You will share the gift of friendship” and “Your hard work will be rewarded.”

  “Did you boys get identical fortunes again?” their uncle inquired, looking over their shoulders.

  They nodded. They always got identical fortunes. Why wouldn’t fortune cookies predict the same future for two boys who were virtually interchangeable?

  “Twin messages again for our twin boys,” said Aunt Judith. “Isn’t it amazing how that always happens? What a coincidence!”

  Allan and Edgar didn’t believe in coincidence.

  Rather, they believed in fortune. Particularly when it was packaged in a cookie….

  Most people don’t take fortune cookies so seriously. But the boys’ fortunes had always been accurate. For example, at age five, they each received a fortune that read:

  This proved true a few days later, when they found themselves involved in a new enterprise called kindergarten.

  At age eight their cookies read:

  And within a week, both boys were banned from Little League for their inability to hold on to their baseball bats when they were up at home plate. Oh, how the spectators in the stands dodged for cover.

  At age ten they read:

  And two days later when the boys “borrowed” Uncle Jack’s car for an experiment, they discovered that pressing on the gas pedal instead of the brake indeed renders obstacles such as fences, walls, and plate-glass windows passable. Yes, they sped right through.

  And there were many other instances.

  Now this: The farm is a brilliant trip….

  The boys had thought they were just retrieving their cat, but perhaps a few pleasant surprises awaited them.

  WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…

  FROM A LETTER WRITTEN NINE YEARS

  EARLIER BY THE BOYS’ MOTHER, IRMA POE,

  TO HER SISTER-IN-LAW, JUDITH

  …the twins remain the great joy of our lives, even if neither Mal nor I truly understand what makes them tick. Doctors agree they’re quite unusual. It’s not just that they’re such accomplished talkers—lots of three-year-olds talk a blue streak. And it’s not just that they’re reading every grown-up book they can get their little hands on. What’s unusual is that they both write in complete sentences. At three years old! Recently, they’ve begun experimenting with various poetic forms, like the sonnet. Where does that come from? And stranger yet is that even Mal and I still can’t tell them apart. It’s not for lack of attention. Believe me, we love our boys. But they confound us. That’s why we’ve agreed to let a specialist at the university observe them. His name is Professor Perry and he’s taken an interest. We don’t see any downside to his involvement, do you?

  Love to you both from

  Irma and Mal

  TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION

  A bell chimed in the front office of the Wagon Wheel Motel as the road-weary Poe family entered. It had been eight hours since their lunch at the Chinese restaurant and three hours since dinner at a greasy spoon this side of the Kansas border. Now they were only a hundred and ten miles from the Gale Farm and OZitorium. But Edgar and Allan didn’t press to go any farther—the hour was late and Uncle Jack was bleary-eyed despite all the coffee he’d been drinking to stay awake.

  Roderick would be OK with the professor for one more night.

  The motel office was packed tight: a wall of brochures for local tourist attractions, a spinning rack of postcards, two armchairs arranged around an end table with a coffee maker, porcelain coffee mugs, and a pink box of doughnuts (left over from that morning’s free continental breakfast). More surprising was a handwritten sign at the tall front desk. It read:

  The night clerk, a sleepy man in his early twenties with bad teeth and a ponytail, emerged from the back room carrying a book of Sudoku puzzles. “Can I help you?”

  “Hey, we’re Poes,” Uncle Jack said, pointing to the sign. “Does that mean we get a discount?”

  “Twenty percent,” the night clerk said, setting the book on the counter.

  “How thoughtful,” Aunt Judith remarked. “But why for Poes?”

  Uncle Jack didn’t wait for the answer. “Doesn’t matter why,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “A discount’s a discount. Right? It’s a great deal. We’ll take it.”

  “How’d you know we were coming?” Allan asked the clerk.

  “Oh, our discount is always available. We value education.”

  “What does education have to do with it?” the boys asked.

  The man looked at them. “You two are good students, right?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘good,’” Allan answered.

  “We know plenty of things,” Edgar added. “More than our teachers, generally.”

  The clerk turned to Uncle Jack. “You’ll have to show documentation to prove you’re a POE.”

  “No problem.” He displayed his driver’s license.

  “Your name’s Poe?”

  “Sure is.”

  The man laughed. “I hate to disappoint you, but the discount isn’t for people named Poe. It’s for members of the organization Parents of Exemplary Students. Get it? P-O-E-S. So unless you’ve got a copy of their current report cards, along with two letters of recommendation from teachers, I’m afraid I can’t give you the discount.”

  Jack balked. “What?”

  “But they are exemplary students,” Aunt Judith said.

  “That’s true,” Allan added, “if by ‘exemplary’ you not only mean smart but also ‘expelled.’”

  The night clerk shook his head, a smile still playing on his face.

  “Fine, then we’ll take our business elsewhere,” Uncle Jack snapped, glancing around the cramped office. “This place isn’t exactly the Ritz.”

  The man shrugged. “There’s not another motel open for sixty miles.”

  Aunt Judith tapped her index finger on the counter. “I think this POES organization is a bad idea. My goodness, parents of exemplary students already get many advantages. What about having an organization for parents of ordinary students?”

  “We tried that,” the night clerk said, fighting off a yawn. “We called it Parents of Ordinary Students. But nobody wanted to join, even for the discount.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who wants to be in an organization called the POOS?”

  Uncle Jack didn’t want to hear any more. “Enough. We’ll take two adjoining rooms.”

  Allan and Edgar turned away and walked over to the postcard rack. They started to spin it, attempting to identify the greatest possible velocity at which centrifugal force would not send the cards flying off into every corner of the office. Faster, faster, faster…

  “Wait a minute, your names wouldn’t happen to be Edgar and Allan, would they?” the night clerk called out.

  The boys stopped spinnin
g the rack (though the rack continued spinning for some time without them) and returned to the front desk. They peered over the top. “Yes, we’re Edgar and Allan.”

  “How did you know their names?” Aunt Judith asked.

  “Somebody found a book this morning on the table here next to the doughnuts,” he answered. He disappeared under the front desk. The Poes could hear him rummaging around. “I could swear those were the authors.” More rustling among junk. “Let’s see, it’s got to be around here somewhere. Ah! Here it is.” He stood up and showed them the book.

  “Oh, this explains it,” Uncle Jack said. He read the title aloud. “Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. This book’s written by Edgar Allan Poe, the famous author. Not Edgar and Allan Poe.”

  The clerk narrowed his eyes. “But look what it says inside.”

  Uncle Jack opened the book.

  Edgar and Allan Poe? Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith looked at each other.

  “Oh, that’s just a misprint,” Uncle Jack said.

  “A typo,” Aunt Judith added. “A coincidence.”

  But the boys didn’t believe in coincidence.

  Edgar took the book.

  “We’d like to keep it,” Allan said.

  “Haven’t you two already read that?” Aunt Judith asked.

  Naturally they had. And while some of the words their great-great-great-great granduncle used were old-fashioned, the stories were grievous, shuddersome, and horrific—in other words, perfect. The twins thought “The Black Cat” had the ideal plot, “The Masque of the Red Death” was outstandingly spooky, “The Pit and the Pendulum” utterly frightening, “The Cask of Amontillado”…well, Edgar and Allan thought that every story in the book was the best of one thing or another.

  “We’d like to read it again,” they said.

  But there was more to it than that.

  Fifteen minutes later, Edgar and Allan sat cross-legged in their motel room on one of the two beds. The other bed was already a shambles, its covers and blankets tossed and scattered and the mattress crushed in the middle as a result of the boys using it like a trampoline, testing the elasticity of the memory foam and the torque of the box springs. The ceiling above the bed had been cracked by Edgar’s head—no damage done, as Edgar’s head was quite hard.