The Tilting House

by Tom Llewellyn

  WE NEEDED TO GET FAR AWAY from civilization. Far away from dogs and cats and rats and other things that could grow big and dangerous. I talked to Dad at breakfast the next day.

  “Don’t you think your poor, recovering son should get out of the house?”

  Dad grunted and kept eating his cereal and reading the paper.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. “Think about all that time Mom spent alone with me. She probably needs a break, because I think I was driving her crazy.”

  “What do you want, Josh?” Dad said, without raising his eyes from his paper.

  “I was thinking it would be fun to go on a boys’ hiking trip this weekend.”

  Dad looked up at me and said, “You’re right. That would be fun.”

  After dinner that night, he packed our pickup with gear.

  It didn’t turn out fun at all.

  We were pulling the packs from our truck at the trailhead when a forest ranger walked up. His beard looked like the moss that hangs from old trees.

  “How you doin’, folks?” he said cheerily.

  “Fine,” muttered Dad. He hated seeing other people when we went hiking. “The whole reason you go hiking is to get away from other humans,” Dad always said. The sight of a single soda can or cigarette butt could ruin his whole weekend. If Dad spotted another hiker, he would walk straight ahead without a word, trying to pretend the person wasn’t there.

  The ranger took Dad’s rudeness in stride. “Well, be sure you stay on the trail,” he said. “This is an awfully remote area. There’s no one to help if you get in trouble. Hardly ever come out here myself.”

  “Good,” said Dad. He pulled the pack onto his back and walked up the trail. Aaron and I had to scramble to catch up.

  It had taken us about six hours to drive to the trailhead from Tilton House in Tacoma. Now we were hiking toward a campsite in the Olympic National Forest, near the Dosewallips River and one of Grandpa’s favorite fishing spots.

  One-hundred-foot-high cedar and fir trees cast the Olympic National Forest in shadow. Soggy, seaweed-colored moss hangs from the branches and droopy ferns cover the ground. At least, that’s how I remember it. I’ve never been back since that trip. I’ll never go back.

  An hour later, we still hadn’t seen another sign of human life and Dad’s mood had improved. The trail was poorly marked and barely maintained, so every half hour we’d stop and Dad would check our progress on his trail map. Each time we took a break, I would take my pack off for a few minutes. I had the metal box hidden under my sleeping bag and it was heavy.

  We walked for two hours until lunchtime. While Dad was fixing cheese sandwiches, I sat next to Aaron to firm up our plans.

  “Tonight, as soon as Dad goes to sleep, we use the grow powder on the key,” I whispered.

  “Does it have to be in the dark?” Aaron asked.

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  After lunch, we put in another four hours of steady hiking before Dad said we should set up camp. “With trees this tall and thick, it’ll get dark early.”

  He pulled out his map again and studied the contour lines, looking for a likely spot. “That’s funny,” he said. “This next part of the map is blank.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Look,” Dad said, pointing at the map. “We’re here. This red line marks the trail and all these curvy brown lines show the contour of the land. The closer they are together, the steeper the land is. But up around this little bend, the lines disappear.”

  “Maybe it’s real flat there,” said Aaron. “That might be a good place to pitch our tent.”

  “Maybe. Or it could be that they didn’t print that part of the map because no one has ever mapped it.”

  “Well, the trail doesn’t go through it,” I said, “so if we stay on the trail, we should be fine.”

  Dad looked at us gravely and put a hand on both of our shoulders. “Josh, Aaron, I think you’re missing something. What we have here is an opportunity. We ’ve stumbled upon uncharted territory. Not much of that left these days. Nearly every square inch of this earth has been tromped over, littered upon, photographed, documented, and generally soaked in the stench of human activity. Now, it could just be that this map is a bad printout, but it’s also possible that we have found a few acres of land no one has ever mapped before. Maybe no one has ever even set foot on it. Think of it. This may be the only chance in our lives to step into the unknown.”

  “The ranger said we should stay on the trail,” said Aaron.

  “Sure he did. And that’s good advice, too. Stay on the trail. Play it safe. Turn your back on your chance for discovery. That’s what we should probably do. Right, boys?”

  “Right!” said Aaron enthusiastically. I nodded.

  “Noooo! No, no, no! You’re not getting it!” Dad shouted, waving his arms around and pacing up and down the trail. “Forget the trail. Forget the dadblamed map! We ’re striking out on our own. ‘O brave new world’ and all that! Tonight, we camp in a new land! Come on!”

  What could we do? We followed Dad around a bend in the trail until, according to the map, the uncharted territory was directly to our left. If that part of the land had never been mapped, I could see why. Bushes and nettles and brambles covered it so densely, it looked like it would take a bulldozer to cut through it. But Dad didn’t hesitate. He stepped over the stinging nettles and plowed into the bushes.

  After fifteen minutes, we were still barely fifty feet from the trail. Thorns caught our clothes and scratched our skin. Thick branches blocked our path, and the farther we went, the soggier the ground got. Finally, the underbrush thinned and the bushes gave way to huge ferns and leggy rhododendrons. The ground was still soggy, but it rose just ahead. If we climbed up that hill, Dad said, we would probably reach drier ground.

  We made it to the top of the hill and stopped. Dad whistled. “Wow,” Aaron said. I agreed. Wow. We were looking at one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen.

  Aaron named it the Mossy Spot and we claimed it on behalf of Tilton House.

  The Mossy Spot consisted of a clearing about four times as wide as our tent, ringed by ancient-looking Douglas fir trees. Everything in the clearing was smothered in thick emerald moss. Everything. There were no bare patches and no other plants—only moss. The moss grew about twenty feet up the trees. It grew over every bump on the ground, large or small. It was so green that I kind of wanted to take a bite to see what it tasted like.

  “This is where we are camping tonight,” said Dad.

  At that moment, I was glad we’d left the trail. As I stared at this untouched morsel of the world, all the scratches on my arms from plowing through the brush didn’t matter.

  When we stepped into the clearing, the spongy moss felt like pillows under our feet. Dad and Aaron dropped their packs and Dad began to unroll our tent. I hesitated before taking off my own pack. The Mossy Spot seemed like the kind of place you should look at and maybe photograph, then leave without making a single mark. But Dad seemed determined to camp there.

  He handed me the hatchet and I began pounding the tent stakes through the previously unscarred moss. When the first stake went in, I flinched a little. Or maybe it was the ground that flinched. It felt like I was poking a pin into flesh.

  By the time we had the tent raised and our sleeping bags rolled out, it was growing dark. Dad fired up the camp stove and boiled some water. I noticed that we were all trying not to make a sound. Our voices felt too much like an intrusion. So we sat inside the tent and ate warm noodles in silence. As soon as the sun went down, the Mossy Spot turned chilly, so we climbed inside our sleeping bags. The moss felt like a thick feather bed beneath us. For some reason it made me wonder if flies felt this comfortable when they first landed on a spiderweb.

  “Hey, Dad. Tell us a scary story,” said Aaron. “Tell us ‘The Golden Arm.’ ”

  “Not gonna happen,” said Dad. “Last time I told that story, you had nightmares for a week and I
got in serious Dutch with your mother.”

  “Besides, this place is scary enough as it is,” I said.

  Aaron sighed, then pulled out a book from his pack and began to read. Dad and I did the same, reading in the lantern light on the soft moss, in the warmth of our sleeping bags. Aaron and I exchanged glances. We knew it wouldn’t take long for Dad to nod off, and then we’d have our chance to try out the grow powder on the key. Soon he closed his book and turned on his side. In less then ten minutes, Dad was snoring softly.

  Aaron whispered, “Get the box.”

  I dug it out of my pack with a grunt.

  “Let’s go outside so we don’t spill any on the tent,” I said.

  “Or on Dad,” said Aaron ominously.

  Dad snored on, unaware that a little carelessness from us might turn him into a giant.

  Aaron picked up the lantern. We quietly unzipped the tent flap and climbed outside. The lantern light only carried a few feet into the darkness. I held the metal box as Aaron set the lantern on the ground and cautiously opened the top drawer. He took out the envelope and key and held them carefully in his hands. “You want to do it?”

  “Only if you want me to.”

  “I want you to.” His hands were shaking. I tried to steady my own hands as I handed Aaron the box and took the envelope and the key. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tiny pocketknife.

  “Is that Dad’s?” Aaron asked.

  “No. I found it in the attic.” I opened the blade and used it to peel back the flap. A teaspoon of tan powder lay inside the envelope.

  “It looks like sawdust,” I said.

  “What now?” Aaron asked.

  I thought for a moment, then slid the tiny knife blade through the key’s handle. I dipped the key and knife into the envelope, saying, “This way, we won’t spill any.”

  But as soon as they touched the powder, both the key and the knife grew five times their size. I was so startled that I dropped the key and the envelope. “Get back!” I yelled. “Whatever you do, don’t get any of that powder on you!”

  The key lay on the moss. It looked like it had grown to the perfect size for the metal box. I reached to pick it up, but before I could, moss covered it.

  The moss was growing.

  I stepped back toward the tent in surprise. With the metal box still clutched in his hands, Aaron ran in the opposite direction, out of the glow of the lantern. A moment later I heard him yelp.

  “What’s going on out there?” mumbled Dad behind me.

  “Help!” Aaron cried. Dad had pulled aside the tent flaps and was kneeling beside me. “Aaron?” he called, looking out. “Josh, where’s your brother? What’s going on?”

  Before I could answer, the lantern grew dim. In seconds, the light changed to an emerald glow and then went out. Moss had completely engulfed it.

  “Get in the tent, Josh,” Dad said. I did. He quickly pulled on his boots and climbed outside. I heard him call, “Aaron! Aaron! Aaron! Aaaaarrronnnn!” His voice became muffled. Then silence.

  My little brother and dad had disappeared in the darkness outside. What was I supposed to do? I realized I was still holding on to what had once been a tiny pocketknife. It was now the size of a machete. I dug through my pack and found my flashlight. I shone it at the door of the tent. Moss was moving quickly across the floor. I slashed at it with the knife, struggling not to scream. I tried to step outside, but the moss immediately began growing over my shoes and up my legs. I slashed at the moss on my shoes and the floor of the tent. I tore my feet free and climbed outside.

  “Dad?” I called. “Aaron?” No answer. I aimed the flashlight around the clearing. My hand was shaking so hard that the beam was jumping all over. I saw two shapes, one tall and one short. Both were completely covered in moss.

  I tried to take a step toward them, but my feet wouldn’t move. I shone the beam down and saw that the moss was growing up my legs again and had reached my knees. I screamed and hacked away at it with the knife. I knew I was cutting my legs, but I was so intent on freeing myself from the moss that I felt nothing.

  I kept slashing and peeling the moss off my legs, but it grew as fast as I could cut it away. I slashed my way over to Dad and Aaron. I began cutting and scraping at the tall shape, jumping up and down to keep the moss from catching hold of my feet. At last, I peeled away a fist-sized section and Dad’s face broke through with a gasp. He stared at me wild-eyed a moment before he finally appeared to recognize me.

  “Cut me loose!” he cried.

  I cut and peeled until his arms broke free. He took the knife from me and began hacking at his feet like a wild man, cursing the moss and praying to God in the same ragged breaths. We both jumped and thrashed around like we were on fire, trying to keep the moss from catching hold. We made our way to Aaron and Dad scraped at Aaron’s face until he’d bared my brother’s mouth and nose. Aaron’s head fell limply to his chest.

  “Stand close to me!” Dad called as I kept jumping from one foot to the other. He continued working at Aaron’s feet. Aaron started to cough. His eyes opened. Blood was running down his cheek where Dad had cut him while scraping away moss.

  Dad spun me around and faced me the way we had come. “Shine your flashlight that way, Josh.” I did. I could see a pyramid-shaped hill of moss where our tent had been.

  “Now we run for it,” said Dad as he gave one final slash to free Aaron’s feet. “I’ll go first with the knife and clear a path. Josh, you keep Aaron in between us and shine your light in front of me as best you can. No one stops running until we hit the trail.”

  The moss grabbed at our feet, but between our fear-fueled speed and Dad’s sweeping slashes, we managed to cross the clearing and plow back down the hillside and through the bushes. We reached the trail, scratched and bleeding.

  Our packs and tent were buried back at the Mossy Spot. There was nothing to do but hike to the trailhead in the cold and dark. Just as dawn was breaking, we reached our pickup truck, where Dad bandaged my legs and Aaron’s cheek as best he could.

  It wasn’t until we were in the pickup driving home that Dad mentioned the metal box Aaron still had in his hands, and the huge knife.

  “You want to tell me about these?” he said quietly. We didn’t. It would have meant telling him that our curiosity had nearly killed us. But in the end, we told him everything.

  “Unmarked territory,” Dad muttered. “And I thought I was the one taking chances.”

  AS SOON AS WE RETURNED from the camping trip, Mom hustled us back into the car and drove us straight to Dr. Trumble’s office. He stitched up two cuts on my leg and a deep one on Aaron’s cheek. We both were going to have scars. Aaron was thrilled—he thought it would make him look like a pirate.

  The metal box sat unopened on our bedroom dresser. The box was built as solid as a safe, and its key was lost forever under the moss. I asked Lola to come over to take a shot at it.

  Lola had never been in our house before. I watched her nervously as she walked through the front door. She stumbled a bit on the tilting floor and then stood as still as a marble statue as her eyes scanned the words, numbers, and diagrams on the walls. A smile flitted across her face, but she hid it quickly.

  “It’s even weirder than I thought,” she said.

  We went up to my room and tried prying the box open, but we succeeded only in breaking one of Dad’s best screwdrivers and one of Mom’s butter knives. Lola ran home and came back with one of her mom’s oyster forks. We broke that, too. Her mom noticed. Apparently, she polishes the silverware once a week.

  We took a break from the box and went outside to ride bikes until dinnertime. When Mom called us in, I left my bike lying on our front lawn, just a few feet from our porch steps. When I went out to get it after dinner, it was gone. I was sure I knew who’d stolen it.

  The Purple Door Man collected junk and hated kids. He wasn’t one of those guys who seemed grumpy until you got to know him and then realized he was gruff but lovable. He was
gruff all right, but he definitely wasn’t lovable. At least once a day, he yelled at us to stop making so much noise.

  But that’s not all he did. He stole from us.

  To be fair to the Purple Door Man, it started with the toys we left in front of his house. We’d step inside for lunch and come back out to find our Frisbee or football gone.

  At first, we figured some kid cruising through our neighborhood had picked them up. Or maybe we had left them somewhere else. Then it started happening more often and it started happening even if the toys had been in our yard.

  Now, two weeks after the horrible camping trip, my bike disappeared from in front of our house.

  I felt sick. It was the middle of summer. My birthday and Christmas were months away, and here I was stuck with nothing to ride.

  The Purple Door Man yelled to me from his front porch, “Sad about your bike, eh, sonny?”

  “What? Did you see who took it?” I asked anxiously.

  “I’m not sayin’,” he said, “but it serves you right for all the noise you kids are always makin’!”

  From the way the Purple Door Man said this, I knew he’d been the one who’d stolen my bike. He smiled.

  In less than a week, Aaron’s and Lola’s bikes disappeared, too.

  I told Mom about my suspicion. She frowned and said it might be so. She even said she would talk to the Purple Door Man, but I could tell she didn’t think it would do much good.

  Then something happened that night that made Mom forget all about our bikes. That was the night we ordered pizza from Big Sam’s Pizzeria.

  The pizza we ordered never arrived. After ninety minutes, I called the restaurant to complain. Big Sam apologized and told me, “Don’t worry, little one. Big Sam’s policy is ‘If the pizza isn’t delivered in half an hour, you don’t have to pay.’ ” He asked for precise directions, which we gave him, but still the delivery guy never showed. We couldn’t have known it had something to do with the way Dad wired the dimmer switch in the dining room.