Aaron burst into tears. Who could blame him? Dinky was huge. The top of her head came up to my chin. She must have weighed three hundred pounds—maybe not as big as a pony, but bigger than any Saint Bernard I’d ever seen.
Dad and Mom pulled Dinky off of Aaron. At Dad’s request, I ran to the garage for some rope. Dad and Grandpa did their best to hold on to the giant dog until I came back, and then Dad tied one end of the rope around her neck and the other end around the holly tree in Mrs. Natalie’s front yard. Dinky strained against it, and for a minute I thought she would rip the tree out of the ground, but it held.
“What am I supposed to do with this thing?” asked Mrs. Natalie to no one in particular.
Dinky dropped the phone from her mouth and barked—a huge, deep sound that rattled my rib cage. Her dark, shiny eyes looked longingly at Aaron.
“She’s not a thing,” said Aaron, wiping the tears from his face. “She’s still Dinky. She’s just big.”
“Mrs. Natalie didn’t mean anything by it, Aaron,” said Grandpa. “It’s just that Dinky is a mighty large dog for one little lady.”
“I suppose I should call the shelter,” said Mrs. Natalie.
“No!” shouted Aaron. “You can’t do that to Dinky!”
“I’m sorry, Aaron,” said Mrs. Natalie, “but honestly, I don’t know what else to do. I can’t keep a dog this big. Especially when she’s so naughty. Come and see what she did to my house.”
We followed Mrs. Natalie inside. She led us into her kitchen, where she pointed to the spot where her phone used to hang from the wall. Now there was a ragged hole and dangling wires. All the knobs had been chewed off the kitchen cabinets, even the ones above the counters. In the living room, the back of the sofa was torn open and the heavy wooden frame was scarred with teeth marks.
Grandpa took Mrs. Natalie by the arm and led her over to our house. We all sat around the kitchen table, discussing what could be done with Dinky and trying to comfort Mrs. Natalie. Aaron stayed outside with Dinky. Someone had to comfort her too, he said.
The adult conversation grew boring pretty fast, so I went outside to check on Aaron. Dinky and Aaron had disappeared. It looked like the rope had been untied from the tree.
I hurried back to tell Mom and Dad, and then we all started searching the neighborhood, calling for Aaron and Dinky as loudly as we could. Once Lola and a few of the other neighbors found out what all the commotion was about, they joined the search. The Talker had been sitting outside the whole time, of course, and Mom actually ran over to ask him if he’d seen anything. He didn’t even glance up at her. He just kept talking about dead bodies and Belgian winters.
Mom called the police, and then she and Mrs. Natalie went next door and searched every room in Mrs. Natalie’s apartment. Two officers came by, and after they took down all the information they said it shouldn’t be hard to spot a dog that big. Lola and I ran down to the schoolyard, but we failed to find so much as a paw print. A few times during the day, I could swear I heard a deep, distant bark, but I could never tell where it was coming from. We crisscrossed the neighborhood all day long, calling and looking and fretting. Mrs. Natalie grew even more frantic, so Grandpa stayed with her at our kitchen table and made her more tea.
Mrs. Natalie was convinced Aaron had run away with Dinky to keep her from sending the dog to the pound. “It’s all my fault,” she said, again and again. I was convinced that Dinky had simply eaten Aaron and run off to look for more young children with sticky hands.
The two police officers stopped by after dark to check on us. They’d found nothing. Neither had we. Mom and Mrs. Natalie cried again. Dad frowned and tried not to curse. Grandpa cursed freely.
Then, just after a dinner that everyone only picked at, the front door swung open and there stood Aaron. We ran toward him, but he lifted up a hand to stop us. And we stopped. Even Mom stopped. Aaron stood looking at us silently, holding us back with his chubby upraised hand. He tilted his head a bit to one side, whispered something, and waved his hand. Silently and gracefully, Dinky stepped through the door. We could hear her soft panting as she took her place beside Aaron. Aaron tilted his head to the other side. He whispered again and Dinky sat down on her haunches. Another whisper and Dinky lay down. Then Aaron smiled, whispered, and tilted his head again. Dinky stood up, walked quietly to the kitchen—right past all of us and right past Mrs. Natalie. Dinky gently took the refrigerator handle in her mouth and pulled the door open. She stuck her huge head inside. She delicately picked up one of Mom’s Diet Pepsi cans, carried it back to Aaron, and lay it at his feet.
“Pretty good, huh?” said Aaron.
Then and only then was Aaron buried in a sea of hugs.
A few minutes later, Aaron pulled Lola and me out of Mrs. Natalie’s earshot. Dinky remained lying down, not moving an inch. “It wasn’t me who trained Dinky. Not really,” said Aaron, quietly. “It was Mr. Daga. When you guys all went inside earlier today, he came out. He was really mad. He said that he wasn’t going to let some loudmouthed dog keep him up all night. Either that dog had to learn some manners, or Mr. Daga was going to chase both Dinky and Mrs. Natalie out. Then he invited us inside.”
“You took Dinky into Mr. Daga’s house?”
“Yup. That’s where I’ve been all day.” Aaron explained to us how Mr. Daga had Dinky under control within seconds. Dinky was obeying the rat’s commands before they reached the top of the stairs. “Mr. Daga talks Dog.”
“He what?”
“He talks Dog. He talks Cat, Rat, and Dog. And English, of course. He learned it all from his dad, he said, who learned it from his dad, who learned it from his, all the way back to Mr. Daga’s great-great-great-grandfather. And guess who he learned it from?”
“Who?” I said.
“You’ve got to guess.”
“Aaron! Who?”
“Tilton. The guy who owned our house. He learned Rat and taught the rats to learn human English. He did it with something Mr. Daga called amp … umm … amplified bio …”
“Amplified bioacoustics?”
“Yeah.”
“Did Mr. Daga teach you how to talk Dog?” Lola asked.
“I wish. He said hardly any humans are smart enough to learn it. He called Tilton ‘a freak of nature.’ It took Mr. Daga all day just to teach me a few basic commands. You have to do them in a really high-pitched voice. So high that most grown-ups can’t even hear them.”
“Is that what you were doing when you first came in?” I asked.
“Yup. I’ll teach you. I can do ‘come’ and ‘sit’ and ‘lie down’ and ‘get me a pop from the fridge.’ That’s all I know. Oh, and Mr. Daga had a long talk with Dinky about bad manners and barking and chewing on things, so she’ll be a nice dog for Mrs. Natalie. I think Mr. Daga kind of freaked Dinky out. Mr. Daga’s got quite a temper. Now Dinky knows Mr. Daga’s the alpha rat.”
Mr. Daga’s talk worked. Dinky was a different dog from then on: quiet, obedient, and well mannered. Not that it mattered, really. Three days later, she started shrinking.
The shrinking didn’t happen the same way as the growing. One day Dinky woke up with her tail shrunk all the way to its original size. It was so much smaller than the rest of her that at first we thought her tail had fallen off. By the next morning her head had shrunk. Her body was still almost pony-sized, but her head was the size of a lapdog’s. Her bark was high and tiny again, not that she barked much that day. As a tiny-headed dog, nearly all she did was eat. It took a lot of eating for that tiny mouth to fill that huge belly.
The body shrank next. When Dinky woke up the following morning, she had a tiny dog’s body with big dog legs. She looked like a fluffy spider. She kept toppling over so she ended up spending most of the day with her legs sticking out of her doggie bed. I laughed every time I looked at her. Even Lola laughed. Aaron sat next to Dinky, patting her head and telling her to ignore us.
The next day, Dinky’s legs had shrunk and she was back to normal, to the relief of Mrs. Na
talie. Actually, she wasn’t completely normal. Her right legs had shrunk all the way down, but her left legs stayed just a little bit longer. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed but for the fact that Dinky tended to run in circles.
The one advantage? Whenever Dinky visited our house, she walked perfectly level on our tilting floors, as long as she moved around the house in a clockwise direction.
Mrs. Natalie seemed happy with her obedient little dog, but now that Dinky was so calm, Aaron didn’t show much interest in her. Dinky walked softly, almost never jumped, and rarely barked—and Aaron spent less and less time with her. By doing what everyone else wanted, Dinky lost the one thing she wanted the most. Dinky still grew excited when Aaron came around, but now she showed her joy with a quiet wag of her tail. Aaron hardly noticed. I did. So did Lola. “You can see her feelings in her eyes,” Lola said. “They look a little sadder than they used to, if you ask me.”
But every now and then the two of them—boy and dog—would connect in the old, wild way. It usually happened outside, down by the end of the block, far away from Mr. Daga. Aaron would shout. Dinky would jump. Aaron would tumble. The two of them would roll together in the green summer grass.
WE’D LOOKED EVERYWHERE for our bikes. The longer we looked for them, the more convinced we became that the Purple Door Man had stashed them in his house.
The sky was clear and blue, but Aaron and I sat in the living room flipping from TV channel to TV channel. Finally, after watching one lousy show after another for about two hours, we grew desperate enough to shut off the TV. We were arguing on the porch about what to do when Lola walked over and stood at the bottom of our front steps. “Who the heck is Tilton anyway?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Tilton,” said Lola, gesturing at the sign next to our front door. “Your sign says ‘Tilton House.’ And Aaron said Tilton taught the Dagas how to speak all those languages. Who is Tilton?”
“I don’t know. I guess he’s the guy who built this house.”
Lola sat next to me. “He must be the one that stayed inside all those years. I wonder if there’s some way we could find out more about him,” she said.
We’d never found anything that mentioned Tilton other than the sign on the porch.
“Maybe we could look in the attic,” Aaron said.
“No way!” I said. “I’m not going back up there.”
“I know where we need to look,” said Lola, “and so do you. We need to open up that metal box.”
“But we’ve tried a million times,” Aaron said.
“What we need is an expert,” said Lola. “Someone sneaky.”
“We need Mr. Daga,” I said suddenly. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.
“The rat?” asked Lola. “Can I meet him?”
“You want to?”
“Yes, Josh Peshik, I want to meet him.”
We took Lola with us over to the Dagas’ house. We had a routine we went through when we visited them. We’d usually bring a gift of food with us, like a hotdog or a cup of Cheerios. We would knock on the door and then announce ourselves. If they wanted to see us, they would open the door.
This time the door opened and Mr. Daga waved up at us with one paw, absently rubbing his hairless belly with the other. His house smelled so bad, it was hard to breathe. “What’s up, little Peshik?” he said. “Is that a hotdog I smell?” I set the hot dog on the floor.
“Who’s your lady friend?” asked Mr. Daga.
“This is Lola,” I said. “She’s our neighbor. She’s okay.”
“Why’s she plugging her nose like that?”
I slapped Lola’s hand down and frowned at her. She forced a close-lipped smile and cautiously followed Aaron and me inside.
Since the Dagas had moved in, they’d done a lot of decorating, rat-style. That meant piles: piles of chewed-up toilet paper, piles of chewed-up newspaper, piles of rat poop, and squirming piles of baby rats, all tumbling over one another, looking for something to chew on.
“You sure have a lot of kids, Mr. Daga,” said Aaron.
“Tell me about it. Heck, these days I’ve even got a lot of grandkids. Maybe even some great-grandkids. Who knows? I can barely keep up with all of ’em. Sometimes I think your dad had the right idea, with just the two of you. But Mrs. Daga—she always wanted a big family.”
We told Mr. Daga about our problem with the metal box. “Sounds like something I could help you with,” he said. His tiny eyes grew bright and his whiskers twitched from side to side. “Let’s have a look-see.”
We set the box down on the floor. Mr. Daga’s little shoulders slumped when he saw it. “Awww, that old thing? Nothing’s in there but an old picture and some scribbling.”
“You mean you’ve looked in this box before?”
“Course I have, kid. If it was in your house, I’ve seen it. That box was up in the attic, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve opened it a bunch of times. Every so often, one of my kids would come across it and think they found something new. They’d always bug me to open it for them. I can unlock it with my eyes closed.”
“Could you unlock it for us, Mr. Daga?” asked Lola.
“Sure, but like I said, there’s not much in it.”
Mr. Daga walked up to the metal box and stuck one of his paws into the keyhole. He reached in all the way to his shoulder, then strained and grunted and grimaced as he pushed and pulled on some unseen gear. Suddenly, we heard a click. Mr. Daga smiled and withdrew his arm.
“There you go, kids. Knock yourselves out. Now if you all will excuse me, I think I hear the wife calling. For all I know, she’s busting out a few more babies.”
The thought of Mrs. Daga busting out babies chased us out the door and down the stairs. We took the box up to our room and set it on the bottom bunk.
The bottom drawer now slid open easily. Inside, we found an old black-and-white photograph of a woman’s face. The corners of the photo were rounded off with tiny bite marks. Mr. Daga and his kids had clearly looked at the photo more than once. The woman in the picture had round, dark eyes, long lashes, and pursed, shiny lips. Her black hair was tied back with a scarf. The photo was signed in a flowing, girlish hand. It said, “Take a piece of my heart” and was signed only with a single letter: M.
“She’s beautiful,” said Lola, her hand going to her hair. “I wonder who she is.”
Under the photo lay a thin notebook. When we pulled it out of the drawer, tiny crumbs of paper fell out of it. Its old cover was brown cardboard, colored and textured to give it the look and feel of leather. The word Journal was printed across the front. Like the photo, the corners of the book were rounded by tiny teeth marks, and the bottom third of the cover was missing completely. I opened the journal carefully and examined the contents. The first ten pages were covered with a shakier version of the same slanting, spidery script on the walls of our house. The rest of the book was blank.
“What does it say?” asked Aaron, trying to get a look.
I held the journal away from him.
“Why don’t you read it aloud, Peshik?” said Lola.
“Okay, okay. No need to get impatient.”
With that, I began to read the following aloud:
I am dying. If not today, then soon. I have no heirs. If you find this book, try to think upon my remains with mercy.
I, Francis Theodore Tilton, was born in 1909, to Henry and Charlene Tilton in Brooklyn, New York. I was a healthy child but for one thing: My left leg was three inches shorter than my right.
My father was a kind and good-natured man and a watchmaker of some renown. I spent many hours at his side, playing with the tiny gears. I made my first working clock when I was seven. My father expressed his pride in my achievement and encouraged my natural abilities.
When I was a boy, Father would create elaborate treasure hunts for me, using the hands of a clock as directional clues. The treasure was always something small—a tool, a carved b
it of wood—but the game was a favorite of mine. If you’ve found this letter, you may be familiar with the game, too.
My mother, a beautiful dark-haired woman with a fiery temper, was my protector and defender. She refused to acknowledge that my uneven legs were a weakness. Thanks to her constant pushing, I excelled in school. I joined the track team and won first place ribbons in the discus and shot put, sports where my shorter leg made it easier to spin my body quickly and powerfully.
Mother taught me to think of my defect as a strength. If my unbalanced gait forced me to watch my step to keep from falling, it also led me to find things on the ground—coins, buttons, old keys. Mother helped me start an extensive coin collection and encouraged my collecting by purchasing rare coins for me.
Do I deny that I was bright? Of course not! I was a genius! I was smarter than any of my classmates and all of my teachers. School was a silly pastime. My childhood friend? Science. I spent my days happily—or at least enthusiastically—in my home, performing electrical and chemical experiments and designing elaborate machinery. Our home was known around our corner of Brooklyn for the mysterious smells that often emanated from it, as well as the occasional explosion. Once I turned our old house cat, Matilda, bright blue with a mixture of oxides. On another occasion I made her disappear entirely by—oh, but that is a tale I have told elsewhere.
All in all, I had a satisfactory childhood. The only trouble I experienced was my own doing, for I had little control over my wicked temper. All my life, it’s been the cause of my grief.
I recall one incident in particular, when a young ruffian named Snark made a comment about my crooked posture in front of a young lady I admired. I waited for Snark after school and called him out and when he approached
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