by Andrew Smith
Karim said, “How do you spell ‘raccoon’?”
So Karim’s amended list looked like this:
What Everyone Needs to Know about the Monster People:
Have not been seen in daylight. May be vampires.
Have a lamp made out of a dead raccoon.
We split up once we were inside the library. Bahar went to the Special Collections Desk to search through the entire bound set of Blue Creek’s weekly local newspaper, the Hill Country Yodeler. Karim browsed the nonfiction section, looking through books that offered mostly true accounts of haunted houses, taxidermy, and supernatural activities. And I resisted my urge to look through the Culinary Arts section,18 because about thirty seconds after we’d gotten inside the library, my attention was kidnapped by the huge wall display near the Teen Zone, featuring the brand-new Princess Snugglewarm graphic novel, which was called Princess Snugglewarm versus the Charm School Dropouts.
I’d had no idea there was a new Princess Snugglewarm book.
“I had no idea!” my mouth said, involuntarily, and also a little too loud for a library.
“Isn’t that cool, Sam? We just got it in on Tuesday!” I felt a hand on my shoulder. The hand was attached to the arm and the rest of the body of Trey Hoskins, the librarian in charge of the Teen Zone, the guy who’d just asked me if I thought Princess Snugglewarm was cool, which, Duh!, yes.
Karim, Bahar, and I hung out in the Teen Zone of the library at least twice a week during the summer. There were always fun things to do there, like video game tournaments, or stitching franken-creatures from cut-up parts of discarded plush toys and plastic dolls. There was a bulletin board where people put up notices for part-time work for teens, and a space where kids could post their own résumés if they were looking for jobs. Michael Dolgoff, a kid who went to school with us whose dad ran a business called Fat Mike’s Worm Farm, had a colorful flyer up in which he advertised himself as a “bait wrangler,” whatever that was. There were pictures of worms and katydids on the ad, and a pale, shirtless Michael Dolgoff standing knee-deep in Blue Creek, holding up a crayfish in each hand. Naturally, I had my own flyer there, advertising catering and fine dining services.
Trey Hoskins was probably the coolest non-kid in Blue Creek. Grown-ups often scowled at him because he looked like he was about sixteen years old, even though he had graduated from librarian college and everything. He had a high level of tolerance for noise (which is probably something all teen librarians need to have), he insisted that all the kids in Blue Creek call him by his first name,19 and he knew about and read EVERY SINGLE THING that had ever been shelved in the Teen Zone, which, of course, included the Princess Snugglewarm graphic novels. Also, Trey liked to make his hair all kinds of crazy colors. This week, it was a brilliant turquoise.
And I suddenly found myself feeling sad when I realized that I was going to have to say good-bye to the library, the Teen Zone, and to Trey.
“I literally had no idea there was a new one,” I kind-of repeated, my eyes wide.
“Yeah. And it’s the best one so far! I don’t know how anyone can make a murderous unicorn so nice and heroic,” Trey said.
“Can I check it out?” I asked.
Trey bit the inside of his lip. “Well, I wasn’t going to let any of them go out until after Saturday. The author is coming on Saturday, and we wanted to be able to get all the library copies signed by him.”
“A. C. Messer is coming here? To Blue Creek?”
Trey laughed and pointed his pale and spidery librarian finger at the flyer tacked to the Princess Snugglewarm wall. The flyer confirmed that A. C. Messer, the deranged visionary behind all things Princess Snugglewarm, would be visiting Blue Creek Public Library this coming weekend. I was so excited, I wanted to run through every aisle until I found Karim and Bahar to tell them the thrilling news.
Except neither Karim nor Bahar liked Princess Snugglewarm comics at all.
“Why?” I asked.
Nobody ever came to Blue Creek unless they had to.
A. C. Messer was a hero of mine. He should have been a hero to all kids everywhere. He’d published the first Princess Snugglewarm graphic novel when he was just fifteen years old. The only thing that could make him more heroic would be if he was also a chef, but nothing I’d ever read about him had had anything to do with cooking at all.
“I’ll tell you what, Sam. I’ll check a copy of Charm School Dropouts out to you because I know you’re a fast reader,” Trey said. “But I’m counting on you, and you have to swear to return it by Saturday morning, before our visit from the author.”
“Excuse me, but I never swear, Trey. However, I will promise to bring it back on time, and stay for the visit, too. Thank you so much!”
It was only Sunday, which gave me nearly a week to read the book and still manage to find a way to put off what I was supposed to be doing for my new school.
And as soon as I had the book in my hands, I wanted to sit down and start reading immediately.
It was almost as though every thought I’d had about the Purdy House, Little Charlie, who had eaten who, monsters, ghosts and vampires, unsweetened iced tea with Bahar, James Jenkins wanting to drop out of his dance program, and moving away from home had been permanently wiped from my mind.
Except, the spiders started doing laps in my belly again.
16. That’s a joke, unless you’re measuring the excitement level of grasshoppers and cicadas.
17. Michelin stars are generally accepted to be the top award a chef can receive. I figured that, in my case, it was only a matter of time.
18. I already knew they didn’t have anything contemporary there, and I refused to even look at books like 101 Delicious Ring Mold Dinner Recipes.
19. This constantly angered Mrs. Barshaw, the librarian who ran the front desk.
THE SCREAMING HOUSE
“No one told me specifically what I was supposed to be looking for,” I said. “I’m sorry, guys. I guess I got distracted.”
Karim and Bahar were mad at me because the only piece of evidence I’d retrieved from Blue Creek Public Library was the new Princess Snugglewarm book, and it provided no insights as far as the history of the Purdy House or the monstrous kid named Little Charlie were concerned.
The three of us had gone back to Karim’s house to “aggregate” (as Bahar called it) the evidence we’d gathered, even though all I had was a real cracker of a story about babysitters who stole things from the houses of their clients and ended up on the business end of Betsy, Princess Snugglewarm’s punishing, ice-pick-sharp skull spike.
Karim was only slightly more helpful than Princess Snugglewarm, to be honest. He’d taken out a book that had been published two years before but had never been checked out until today. Karim’s book was a scholarly work called Attachments: The History of Injustice and Its Reported Links to Haunted Places in America, and it must have weighed fifteen pounds.
“At least there are pictures in it,” Karim pointed out.
And I said, “There are pictures in my book too.”
Then Karim plopped his ghost book down on the floor between us, fanned it open to about page 400 or something, and poked a finger down in the center of an old black-and-white photograph.
“Bam!” he said. “The Purdy House.”
“What does it say about it?” I asked.
Karim shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t read it. The print is really small and there are some words in here I’ve never heard of before. But at least I found the picture.”
Karim spun the book around so that it was facing me. The photograph of the Purdy House must have been taken a long time ago, because the gates were not chained shut, and the NO TRESPASSING signs had not been installed. Other than that, and the fact that the house in the book was not dilapidated and splintering, the Purdy House of the picture was undoubtedly the place that everyone in Blue Creek knew stood right next to Karim’s house.
And beneath the photograph was the only entry about the Pu
rdy House in the entire fifteen-pound book. The caption said this:
Purdy House, Blue Creek, Texas: Sometimes referred to as the “Screaming House.” It was originally constructed by Ervin Purdy and Cecilia Pixler-Purdy, and reported to have been the site of numerous disappearances, acts of alleged cannibalism, and other unexplained disturbances dating back to the late nineteenth century. The vacant residence has been the site of several studies, most recently by the University of Arizona, 2002, which provided inconclusive results.
I looked at Karim. “People called it the Screaming House?”
“I’ve never heard it called that before,” Bahar said, and she’d probably heard of twice as many things as Karim or I had, easily.
“Obviously my parents didn’t do their neighborhood research very well before deciding to move here,” Karim said. “But I’ve never heard the place scream.”
“Nobody would ever want to live next to a home that actually screams,” I said.
Just thinking about what screams from a screaming house would sound like gave me chills, even though it was a hot, sunny, summer day and I was sitting on the floor of Karim’s bedroom, looking through books in the company of two of my closest, non-screaming friends.
But it was Bahar, naturally, who’d uncovered the most real information on the Purdy House, or at least information that was as real as anything else you’d ever find in the Hill Country Yodeler. She’d made three photocopies of an article she’d found in the Special Collections, which dated all the way back to 1919, the first year our local paper went into circulation. The article was about the Purdy House and the unfortunate people who’d lived there, or those who’d only visited it.
And Bahar had brought multiple copies of other articles too, so we could all look at them at the same time. But, Bahar being Bahar, she said we would read them in chronological order, together, and starting with the oldest one. It was pretty interesting, but it also felt a little bit too much like being in school.
I was torn with guilt because all I really wanted to do was finish my Princess Snugglewarm book so that I could give it back to Trey before Saturday and then somehow get on to reading the stack of novels I’d been assigned for my summer schoolwork.
“Let’s read this one first,” Bahar said. “We’ll look at the next ones after we figure out if there’s anything of substance that connects the Purdy House of a century ago to the Purdy House of today. Judging from the headlines, there’s some stuff in here that I’ve never heard about.”
“I’d never heard about the whole screaming thing to begin with,” I said.
So we sat together in Karim’s bedroom and read the first article from 1919. It was impressive to me to think about how much Blue Creek had changed in the past century. On the front page of that issue of the Hill Country Yodeler, there was a story about how federal law enforcement agents had arrested a group of Communists who’d come from California.
Maybe Blue Creek hadn’t changed that much, I thought. At least the agents had been successful at keeping California Communists out of Blue Creek for the next hundred years.
But the first story Bahar wanted us to read was not about Communists from California so much as it was about demons and stuff from the darkest depths of wherever demons and stuff like to come from.20 And like a lot of newspapers from that era, the Yodeler stacked headlines with subtitles over most stories, and the one Bahar gave us to read started off with the following openers:
A HOLY TERROR.
THE HOUSE OF SCREAMS.
A MODEST STORY FROM BLUE CREEK-TOWN.
Last Saturday, the Hill Country Yodeler published a remarkable story based on an interview with a rancher from Blue Creek-Town which detailed the frightening goings-on in the abandoned home once belonging to Ervin Purdy and Cecilia Pixler-Purdy.
The story recounted by the rancher, Jacob Swift, was immediately suspect due to Mr. Swift’s incarceration for public intoxication and the likelihood that the effects of bug-juice played havoc with liberating hob-goblins from the man’s wild imagination. A second source has since come forth, however, so well-vouched-for that we now must accredit Mr. Swift’s account a confident degree of credence.
The newly revealed source, a constable from San Jacinto County, confirms the following strange events as fact. We provide his recollection for what it is worth:
Newly arrived in Blue Creek-Town, Constable Peter Frick, who was at the time traveling to Austin, was startled from his sleep in the night where he camped near the Creek by indescribable screams thundering from the north, coming from the direction of the town’s settlement.
Mr. Frick arose, but hearing no further sounds and seeing nothing which might alarm him, returned to his bedroll. Shortly afterward the screams came again, with a renewed intensity. Mr. Frick described the sound as something that had convinced him that he had encamped in the path of a cyclone. This time, upon rising, the constable noted a swirling black cloud rising in the north, which blotted out all light from the moon and stars, as though the form itself was quite cohesive and impenetrable.
Being an agent of the law, Mr. Frick retained his Winchester and followed Blue Creek in the direction of the terrible cacophony, where he soon found himself standing before the locked gates of the Purdy House, from which he determined the screams had been emanating.
At this point, the black cloud which was hovering like a winged guardian above the House began to descend, and Mr. Frick took his rifle and fired twice into the cloud. His description of the experience is very succinct: “The thing was at least twenty feet across, moving like an enormous bird. Once I fired into the demonic form, the being dispersed and vanished, and the screams from within the house, which sounded like all manner of suffering and pain, subsided.”
It was only then that Mr. Frick encountered the shaken and senseless Mr. Swift, inebriated and frightened to the point of incoherence, cowering inside the locked gates of the Purdy House.
It was impossible to determine how Mr. Swift had managed to pass beyond the secured gates.
The constable was able to subdue Mr. Swift, who was remanded to the custody of the authority of Blue Creek-Town.
Mr. Frick experienced no further disturbances that night.
Mr. Swift, on the other hand, insisted that he had been visited upon by the cannibalistic child named Charlie Purdy, an orphan boy adopted by Ervin and Cecilia Purdy, who had vanished without a trace some twenty years earlier.
“Okay. That’s pretty weird,” I said.
“That’s freakin’ scary,” Karim added.
“No. I actually thought it was weird that a hundred years ago, the Yodeler started out trying to be an actual, real newspaper, as opposed to one that just criticizes the food at the golf course and posts angry editorials about speeders from Austin,” I said.
20. Also, apparently, a hundred years ago Blue Creek was called Blue Creek-Town.
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE MONSTER PEOPLE (PART 2)
What Everyone Needs to Know about the Monster People:
Have not been seen in daylight. May be vampires.
Have a lamp made out of a dead raccoon.
Have a hideous black flying beast that is bulletproof and comes out of their house at night during all the screaming.
IN WHICH WE TALK ABOUT PRINCESS SNUGGLEWARM, LOVE, AND THE BEST KIND OF MAYONNAISE
“No one who’s actually read a Princess Snugglewarm graphic novel in its entirety could ever possibly resist becoming a completely dedicated subject of her kingdom, or princessdom, or whatever it’s called,” I said.
I was lying in bed with the book fanned open on my chest. I’d finished reading Charm School Dropouts after dinner, which meant I could probably read it at least five more times before I had to give it back to Trey at the library on Saturday morning.
The house was quiet; Dylan, Evie, and Mom and Dad had all gone to sleep. Karim stood with an arm resting on the sill of my (as usual) open window, with his head turned so one ear was pointing out in the
direction of the Screaming House. Just in case. Also, he’d brought his Teen Titans pajamas, which I could have given him a hard time about, but I let it slide.
Regardless: Princess Snugglewarm > Houston Astros > Teen Titans.
“I have read one from start to finish,” Karim said. “It was the one about the vampire impalas or antelopes, or something.”
“Oh! Princess Snugglewarm versus the Vampalas and Vampelopes. That was a good one. It had a Gobblepotamus in it too.”
I’ll be honest: Princess Snugglewarm versus the Vampalas and Vampelopes had tested my enduring commitment to Princess Snugglewarm. It’s all because in that particular volume, Princess Snugglewarm confessed her deep hatred for mayonnaise. It would be one thing if she had made it specifically clear that jarred—or, worse yet, plastic-squeeze-bottle—mayonnaise was disgusting and could possibly turn someone into an eternally undead bloodsucking creature of the savanna, while real, fresh homemade mayonnaise (or, better yet, aioli) was one of the greatest culinary achievements of humankind.
If Princess Snugglewarm only knew!
I had been so disheartened by that particular anti-mayonnaise episode that I’d even written a letter of protest to A. C. Messer, author-illustrator of Princess Snugglewarm, which he’d never answered. And then, by the time the next Princess Snugglewarm graphic novel had come out, which was about a ring of homework cheaters, I had forgotten all my doubts about her magnificence, because who doesn’t want to see cheaters who copy homework get gored by a unicorn, right in the middle of math class?
“I don’t know. Stabbing people in the heart with Betsy just because they put mayonnaise on cooked macaroni and call it a pasta salad seems a bit rough.”
“It won’t seem rough fifty years from now when everyone in the world wakes up, Karim,” I said. “It just shows how far ahead of her time Princess Snugglewarm really is. And anyway, it was jarred mayonnaise. I wrote to the author and asked him if there’d be a follow-up about how handmade mayonnaise is outstanding.”
