by Andrew Smith
So there I was, all alone in the dark.
* * *
And then not alone anymore.
“If attics are the brains of a haunted house, then basements are the bellies!”
A light came on, and I found myself once again face-to-face with an armadillo named Bartleby. Also, I was apparently somewhere else inside the Purdy House, which was not a comforting thought. But I knew I had been there before, and it was all teasing at me, whispering—like a dream that you just can’t recall, but you still can somehow sense that it’s hiding there, tickling away at your thoughts.
Then it all came rushing back to me, a memory from when I was four years old and trapped in the hole that would forever come to be known as “Sam’s Well”—the broken chair; the woodstove with the hanging and disconnected chimney pipe (which probably explained where Bahar’s bats had come from); the playing cards and chest of drawers with the pennies and buttons in it; the twisted, witch-hair-like roots tangling down through the impossibly dark ceiling overhead.
I was back inside Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout—the belly of the Purdy House.
“Ah! Remember, Sam? This is where it all began!” Bartleby said, and when he said “all began,” he made a graceful rainbow in the air over his head with his stubby front armadillo arms, like a bloom opening up.
“Where what all began?” I asked.
Bartleby squinted and pointed his snout to the left, then to the right, and then just for good measure back to the left again. “You know—you and me. Our journey through life together, Sam!”
“Oh. That,” I said. “And how did I get here? The last thing I remember is that I was up in an attic in the dark. How did I end up down in this place?”
“Ha ha! Don’t you remember? You fell down a hole when you were just about the size of a potato bug!” Bartleby laughed and slapped what would be his knee if armadillos had such things as knees.
Most of the time, Bartleby could be absolutely infuriating. And the rest of the time, he was merely annoying.
“I’m just kidding!” he said. “You followed me here through the secret passageway. No respectable haunted house could ever be built without lots and lots of secret passageways! And it was a lucky thing you needed me too, because I’d never have thought my old pal Ishmael would still be around here, just hanging out—and with a lightbulb sticking out of his noggin to boot! Ha ha! So, thanks for pointing him out to me! And, if I might add, I’m sure the only things that come out of my head are brilliant ideas, as opposed to lightbulbs! Ha ha! Brilliant! Like a light! Get it, Sam?”
Ugh.
Ishmael. The more-than-a-century-old lamp-raccoon with the bald leg.
And of course he’d be a friend of Bartleby’s.
Bartleby had mentioned the name Ishmael that day I went to the Uniontown Mall, when Mom had wanted to make me try on all those school clothes.
For so many years, I’d always assumed that Bartleby was just a dream I’d have—something that popped into my head when I had claustrophobia, and then disappeared again once the claustrophobia was over. But there was something else about Bartleby that just had to be real.
“You really are real, aren’t you?” I said.
Bartleby scratched at the whiskers under his armadillo chin. “Is that really a real question?” he asked. Then he laughed. “Ha ha! Brilliant! You want to know how I can really prove I’m really real?”
But the last time Bartleby had tricked me into allowing him to prove he was real, he’d (excuse me) pooped on my foot, and I wasn’t about to fall for that again.
“Um. No, thanks,” I said. “I believe you.”
“Oh. Well, that’s nice, Sam. Because I’ve always believed in you,” Bartleby said, and if armadillos could have a hurt look in their eyes, Bartleby had one at just that moment.
I felt bad for hurting his feelings. After all, Bartleby had always been there whenever I’d needed him, even if at times I hadn’t thought I did. Even if up until tonight, I’d never really believed in him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was mean of me.”
“So. Does that mean you want me to prove it?” Bartleby grinned a sharp-toothed armadillo grin.
“No.”
“Well, if you’re finally giving up on disbelieving what is the honest truth, Sam, then you should probably know that we need to get back to the attic before that Brenden kid calls the police, which—trust me—he is about to do.”
It really was turning out to be just like what had happened to my dad, James’s mother,76 and Oscar Padilla, and I desperately did not want to end up being taken to jail like Dad was.
“So!” Bartleby said. “To the secret tunnel!”
And when Bartleby said “secret tunnel,” his eyes widened to the size of shiny black quarters.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
I was confused, and a little bit scared that this was some kind of final good-bye from Bartleby, and nobody likes good-byes. Nobody.
All these good-byes.
“I thought you needed to tell me something, or something,” I said.
Bartleby snickered. “Ha ha! Something, or something, or something really real. Ha ha, Sam! You know all the best words!”
Then came the sound of a distant knocking, and I heard Brenden Saltarello somewhere in the house calling, “Sam! Sam!”
He must have been knocking on the attic door, way up above us.
“Come on, Sam! Follow me!” Bartleby waved me toward the tiny doorway in the dirt floor—the same one where Oscar Padilla had gotten stuck that night he’d taken the dare and stayed here with my dad and Linda Swineshead in the Purdy House.
Bartleby ducked inside his secret passageway, and then paused for a moment before turning around to look at me. Upstairs, Brenden knocked and knocked, bats flew in a permanent circular holding pattern, Bahar was probably cleaning up pork and beans from the bathtub, and stuffed animals moved around when no one was watching them.
Bartleby said, “I will tell you this, though, and I swear on Ethan Pixler’s coffin that it’s the truth—that I believe you’re going to do just great at the new school, Sam! Think about it. It’s everything you’ve always wanted! And I believe you’re going to make lots and lots of friends there, so stop being so scared and get over it. It’s time to be brilliant, Sam! And I believe you have a crush on your friend Bahar too, and you should stop being scared of that.”
I protested, “I do NOT—”
But Bartleby cut me off with a raised (and dirty) armadillo claw in a gesture of, Hold it right there, pal.
He said, “But it doesn’t matter at all what I believe, Sam, because all of that—everything—is up to you, and what you believe in.”
Everything went completely black. Then slashes of light broke a rectangle in the floor. I was back inside the little attic room with all the labeled electrical switches on the wall, and Brenden Saltarello was coming into the attic to look for me.
Brilliant.
75. The same floor where we had seen little Boris standing at the window wearing a nightshirt in the photograph that Karim had taken just a few days ago, which now seemed like years ago.
76. And I still could not get over the fact that they were boyfriend and girlfriend when they were teenagers.
PRINCESS SNUGGLEWARM COMES TO TOWN, AND THREE ASTONISHED BOBCATS
Everyone in Blue Creek eventually became big fans of the Purdy House and the plan that Mr. and Mrs. Blank presented to the town council for turning it into the centerpiece of a taxidermy theme park called Blue Creek Land.
As Mr. Blank would later explain, “America has waited long enough for a taxidermy theme park, and Blue Creek is just the place to showcase the wonders of preserving death.”
So that had been the plan all along.
They opened up the entire house, even the attic and the secret chamber beneath the basement, despite the occasional mysterious noises, and the unexpected icy breezes.
Etha
n Pixler must not have been a sound sleeper.
On the other hand, I did not appreciate the inclusion of the Little Boy in the Haunted Well attraction. As it turned out, the small hill of piled-up debris covering the entrance to Sam’s Well was on the Blanks’ property too. Go figure.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what—or who—Mr. Blank would taxidermy to play the part of four-year-old Sam Abernathy.
But we didn’t really start to put together the mystery of what had actually been going on at the Purdy House until the following day—the day after that horrible night with Boris, the bats, and Ishmael and all his movable friends.
I should explain.
To begin with, it was a lucky thing for me and my parents that Brenden Saltarello did not end up calling the police that night, even though the next day when my non-terrified mind considered the possible outcomes of a 911 call, there was no logical reason I could think of why I would have ended up in jail like my dad had when he was just about my age.77
After Brenden found me in the smaller attic—the “brains” of the haunted house—the four of us (Bahar, Brenden, me, and Boris) climbed out through the second-story window in Boris’s bedroom and ran all the way in the dark, past Sam’s Well (soon to be the Little Boy in the Haunted Well interactive fun house),78 and through the woods to my house.
Boris, as anyone who knew him would come to expect, complained the whole way: he hated running in the dark, we were kidnapping him, he didn’t like the types of trees we have in Texas, he hated one-story houses (my house, in other words), and—of course—he was hungry, and so he asked if I had anything to eat at my house, but I refused to answer him because I’d already been trapped inside one small black hole that night, and once was more than enough for me.
The normal, non–Monster People of our group were so shaken by the creepy moving-around dead animals and wild attack-bats79 that we basically said nothing to each other all night regarding what we’d seen in the Purdy House, as each of us silently tried to sort out exactly what it was that truly had happened there—and why. We all looked as pale as Boris’s nightshirt, and as wide-eyed as astonished salt-and-pepper-bearing bobcats. But with two eyes.
Mom fell instantly in love with Boris. She said he was the most adorable six-year-old boy she’d ever seen, which made me more than a little jealous. And she even suggested that he might like to become playmates with Dylan and Evie, who had already gone to bed. But when Boris asked Mom what a “playmate” was, I knew she would be in for a long and deeply disappointing conversation.
After all, not all monsters are fifty feet tall with enormous fangs, flames spouting from their nostrils, and an insatiable appetite for human beings. Some could be six-year-old boys wearing nightshirts.
And when Boris asked my mom if there were any snacks in the house, I knew Mom was doomed.
Bahar let Mr. and Mrs. Blank know where we were, and then called them again so they could take her and Boris home, but before she left, she swore one more time that she would never, ever babysit for Boris Blank again. And after the Blanks came and picked up Bahar and Boris, Brenden and I discovered the disappearing Karim. He was asleep in his bed, which was in my room that had now become Karim’s home away from home.
And he was wearing a set of my pajamas.
“Hey! Dang, Karim, you have Princess Snugglewarm pj’s? I never knew that!” Brenden said. He looked at Karim with awe and wonder, like this was something about Karim that was too impressive for Brenden to overcome, a possible deal breaker on his being okay with their breakup.
But they weren’t Karim’s pj’s; they were MINE.
Karim yawned and stretched, then looked at me with cold and calculating Karim-is-about-to-drop-a-whopping-lie eyes. He said, “Oh yeah. Princess Snugglewarm is way cooler than Teen Titans or the Houston Astros.”
Brenden visibly swooned. “I have those exact same pj’s!”
And Karim said, “Are you going to see the Princess Snugglewarm author at the library in the morning? We should totally go there together, Brenden!”
Brenden and Karim locked eyes for at least five silent seconds.
Like Bahar had said, someone has a crush on someone.
I grabbed one of my summer reading books from the stack on my dresser and tossed it onto my bed.
“If you guys don’t mind, I think I’d better get some homework done before this summer is totally gone,” I said.
* * *
Saturday came.
The big day—my last Saturday in Blue Creek, the chance to meet A. C. Messer, unsweetened iced tea with Bahar,80 the return of James Jenkins, and the “big reveal” of what outfit Karim would choose from MY WARDROBE.
I was a mess, and I’d hardly slept at all. The upside was that I’d managed to read the entire book Animal Farm, which was really short and also very sad.
So maybe I would finish all that summer reading after all.
Like all summers, this one had stampeded through town like a runaway weekend.
Mom dropped me off at the library. Bahar was already sitting down in the front row of chairs in the Teen Zone, and Karim had left my house before breakfast so he could walk there with Brenden. Trey Hoskins’s hair was pink that day, the same color as Princess Snugglewarm’s mane, and he looked a little nervous because there were only about a dozen kids in the audience at the library waiting to hear A. C. Messer tell his stories about where Princess Snugglewarm came from, and, hopefully, what we might expect from her in the future.
A dozen kids (including Trey Hoskins) at a library author talk might be a disappointing turnout for a place like Austin or Houston, but by Blue Creek standards it was a packed house. Still, Mr. Messer seemed perturbed by the size of the audience, and offered only short sarcastic answers to the few questions he got from the kids in attendance. He wasn’t anything like I’d expected, but maybe that’s how it is with most famous people when you feel like you already know them before you actually get the chance to meet them face-to-face.
When Brenden Saltarello asked him, “Why did she name her horn ‘Betsy’?”
His answer was, “Because it rhymes with ‘murder.’ ”
Like I said, he was sarcastic, and not very nice.
Another kid in the audience stood up and said, “How long does it take you to write a book?”
And A. C. Messer answered, “I write one page every thirty seconds.”
Bahar, who was sitting next to me, elbowed my side and whispered, “Ask him a question.”
I shook my head. I was too nervous for that.
When Karim, who was wearing my ONE AND ONLY Princess Snugglewarm T-shirt, asked A. C. Messer, “How much money do you get paid for writing a book?”
His answer was this: “Two dollars and twenty-five cents. In Bulgarian currency.”81
Bahar elbowed me again, but I couldn’t talk.
And then Bahar said, “Do you often receive complaints from parents who have to somehow balance the enormous popularity Princess Snugglewarm has among young people with the fact that she is frequently and arbitrarily violent?”
In response, A. C. Messer simply said, “No.”
Another elbow from Bahar.
So finally I gathered my strength, swallowed the knot in my throat, raised my hand, and said, “Aioli is a kind of mayonnaise that tastes really good.”
I know. It wasn’t a question.
But Karim almost immediately blurted out, “I’d like to try aioli!”
And A. C. Messer lifted up his hands like he was begging for some kind of heavenly reprieve and said, “I’m through here.”
I suppose artists are known for sometimes being temperamental.
But in his final remarks before allowing us to line up and get Mr. Messer to sign our personal copies of his books, Trey Hoskins mentioned that Mr. Messer had come to Blue Creek as part of a business venture with the new family in town—the Blank family—who were working on developing a robotic-taxidermied-animal theme park with him.
As if that e
xplained everything.
In a matter of seconds, Brenden, Bahar, and I glanced knowingly at each other. It was like a big narration bubble in a Princess Snugglewarm comic had been filled in above our heads, and once again we looked like astonished bobcats who had just figured out the meaning of everything. That was the reason behind the weird moving animals in the Purdy House, and for all those switches on the wall of the small attic where I’d gotten trapped.
I think we simultaneously exhaled sighs of relief, knowing that what had happened to us the night before wasn’t as crazy as we’d thought it was, even though it was still pretty crazy.
77. Also, I might add, as far as I know, to this day Mom never found out about Dad spending the night in jail, or about the whole Linda-Swineshead-who-is-James-Jenkins’s-mother-being-his-first-girlfriend thing, either.
78. And just thinking about this gives me claustrophobia.
79. I may be exaggerating here.
80. Who I DID NOT have a crush on, by the way.
81. The currency in Bulgaria is called the lev. This would be about four of them.
THE LAST ICED TEA OF SUMMER
Someone should have warned me about how awful it was going to be.
It was impossible to think that anything could be more stomachache-inducing than the feeling of knowing this was the final Saturday of summer, the last time Bahar and I would share an unsweetened iced tea at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner in Blue Creek, Texas.
As usual, the place was empty except for the two of us. And it seemed quieter than it had ever been before too.
Kenny Jenkins was just as surly and unwelcoming as ever. He predictably mumbled about how Bahar and I were the only people in the state of Texas who expected him to make tea without adding a five-pound bag of sugar to it, and how things like unsweetened tea were as uncivilized in these parts of the country as boys who didn’t like to play football. Kenny Jenkins never did get over the fact that James gave up on his father’s dream of football stardom so that he could go live with his mother in Austin and do what he wanted to do most of all, which was dance. And I’m sure Kenny Jenkins blamed me more than anyone else for the changes in his son.
