The wood had lost its paint years ago, and the weathered gray planks crumbled silently in the sun. The shutters were black and peeling. A couple of tall, gnarled trees grew against the side walls, and overgrown bushes spilled out into the knee-high lawn.
It looked like a haunted house. Or an abandoned building. Or both.
“Oh no,” Peter whispered as a look of horror crept over his face.
“Peter, I know it looks…interesting, but it’s a great old place. I grew up here, you know.”
“You made me leave Carlos and Steven and Ben for this? I left my friends so we could live here?”
“Peter, don’t do this. Not now. Not in front of Grandfather. Smile, okay? We’ll talk about it later.”
Peter looked out the windshield, up ahead of the car. There, standing in the overgrown grass by the front steps, was a crazy old man to go with the crazy old house.
He was tall and gangly like a scarecrow, though a well-dressed one: black pants, white long sleeve shirt, gray patterned vest, a tie knotted under his collar. He looked like he was going to church.
But if his clothes looked dressy, his face just looked scary. Wild, piercing eyes blazed from beneath bushy brows. A scraggly white beard sprouted from his cheeks and jaw. He was bald on the front and top, but thin wisps of hair clung to the sides of his head.
Grandfather Flannagan.
Peter had never met him. Grandma Flannagan had flown out to California a couple of times, but she had died when Peter was four. He could barely remember her. There were some faded photographs of her smiling in front of their apartment, and equally faded memories of a sweet lady who gave him candy when Mom wasn’t looking.
They had never visited his grandparents’ house – at least, not since Peter was a baby – and Grandfather had never visited them. Suddenly Peter wished one of the two had happened, because if it had, he would have fought a lot harder to stay in California.
“Who’s dat scare-wy man?” Beth whimpered.
“He’s not scary…that’s my daddy. He’s nice, you’ll see,” Mom said, though something in her tone wasn’t exactly convincing.
Peter looked in the mirror and smoothed his sandy brown hair, then looked down to make sure his shirt and shorts didn’t have any ketchup or mustard stains. Normally he couldn’t have cared less, but something told him he was about to get a military inspection.
Gravel crunched under the tires as the Honda pulled up to the front of the house. Peter watched uneasily as the old man peered inside the car, straight at Peter’s face.
Mom was the first out. “Hello, Dad.” She smiled, and gave him a little hug.
“Mrm” was his only reply.
She opened the car’s back door and unbuckled the kiddie seat. “This is Beth. Um, don’t mind the bathing suit.”
For the first time in her life, Peter’s sister had nothing to say. She just sat there in Mom’s arms, fingers in her mouth, staring at Grandfather as he stared back at her.
“And this is Peter.”
That was his cue. Peter opened the door and stepped out.
Grandfather’s eyes burned a hole in his skull. “Peter, eh?”
Peter nodded.
“How old are you, boy?”
“N-nine and a half,” Peter stuttered. “I’ll be ten in March.”
“Hrm.” Grandfather turned back to Mom without giving Peter another glance. “So I guess we’ll be moving you in now.”
“Well, we could go on a little tour of the house first. The bags aren’t going anywhere.”
“Hrm.” Grandfather turned and walked up the front steps into the house without another word.
“You coming, Peter?” Mom called.
“Uhhhh…I’m gonna walk around outside first, stretch my legs,” Peter replied.
“Okay, suit yourself.”
“Mommy, he’s a scare-wy man,” Beth whispered a little too loudly.
“No, it’s just Grandfather,” Mom said in a hushed voice. “We’re going to go see your new room now.”
Peter waited until they were inside. Once they were gone, he kicked the gravel in frustration.
Freakin’ – dang it – flippin’ –
Thousands of miles to come live in a rundown shack.
Peter shielded his eyes with his hands and peered up at the house.
A huge rundown shack.
It was sort of cool, actually, in a horror movie kind of way.
He just didn’t want to live in a horror movie, that’s all.
Peter circled the house and counted the odd, mismatched windows. After losing count, he backed up almost a hundred feet to try and see that crazy balcony on the roof again.
“Psst,” somebody said behind him.
Peter whirled around.
3
About 20 feet away sat a rundown fence made of graying logs and wood posts that were nearly swallowed by weeds. Behind the fence slouched a pale little kid with sunburned cheeks and a blond crewcut. He had on a dirty shirt with yellow, orange and red stripes, and he wore barely-tied hightop tennis shoes. Bony knees stuck out of his oversized shorts, which were cinched tight with an old brown belt.
The kid nodded once. “What up.”
Peter raised a hand and waved tentatively.
“You movin’ in?” the kid asked.
Peter nodded. “Yeah.”
“That your granddad?”
“Yeah.”
The kid shook his head like he pitied Peter. “He’s craaaaazy, man.”
Peter smiled a little. “Yeah, he sure seems like it.”
“Pff, he doesn’t just seem crazy, he is crazy. I watch the windows up there sometimes at night, like, two or three in the morning after the midnight monster marathon is over? Lights all over the place, floating from room to room. Creeeee-py. You wanna piece of gum?”
The kid produced a grubby pack out of his pocket.
What the heck.
Peter walked over and was about to take a piece –
“Sorry if the wrapper’s sweaty, it’s been in my pants,” the kid said.
Ew.
Peter hesitated, then took it anyway.
“Uh, thanks. I’m Peter.”
The kid stuck out his hand through the rails in the fence. “Dill.”
Peter’s eyebrows shot up. “Dill?”
The kid glared. “No jokes about pickles. I heard ‘em all, I’m sick of ‘em, I don’t wanna hear ‘em. Got it?”
Peter shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say any pickle jokes.”
Dill relaxed. “Good. How old are you?”
“Nine and a half.”
“Ha! I’m almost ten, my birthday’s in November. I could beat you up.”
Peter looked down at Dill. Peter was half a foot taller and probably twenty pounds heavier.
Yeah, right.
“But don’t worry, I won’t,” Dill reassured him. “I’m just sayin’. But you and me, we could beat up a twenty year-old.”
Peter frowned. “How do you figure that?”
“Nine and a half plus almost ten is…” Dill paused to count. “Okay, I don’t know what that is, but we could definitely beat up a sixteen year-old, cuz together we’re older.”
“Uh-huh.” Peter nodded, totally bewildered by Dill’s logic.
“So, you ready for school?”
“No.”
“Neither am I. I HATE school. Starts on Monday, though.” Dill looked around the yard like an old man taking stock of his life. “The time, where does it go?”
“It starts on Monday?” Peter asked in shock.
“Yeah.”
“That’s in two days!”
“No duh. I see they taught you the days of the week.”
“School doesn’t start for another two weeks in California!” Peter fumed. Great, he’d moved to a giant shack out in the middle of nowhere, and now they’d stolen two weeks of his summer from him, too.
“That where you’re from?” Dill asked.
“Yeah.”
“And school starts in two weeks there?”
“Yeah.”
“You think we can move there?”
“Uhhh…”
“We should totally move there,” Dill enthused wildly, “and then I bet school doesn’t start for another two weeks in Japan, so then we could move there, and just keep traveling around the world to the next place where school doesn’t start for two weeks, until we wind up back here in the summer.”
Peter squinted at him. “That’s insane.”
“No, man, it’ll work. You know how somewhere in the world, it’s always night? Like, it’s night in China somewhere right now?”
“Yeahhhh…” Peter agreed, waiting for Dill’s bizarro logic to kick in.
“Well, there’s probably always someplace in the world where school doesn’t start for two weeks. We just gotta find it over and over and over again. Man, I am good. California, here I come.”
Peter laughed. “I don’t think my Mom’ll let me go back.”
“What about your dad?”
A long pause. “I haven’t seen my dad for a couple of years.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Peter shrugged. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay, but Peter knew that’s what you said in these circumstances.
“Dads are highly overrated,” Dill continued. “My dad basically just comes home from work, yells at me, goes to sleep on the couch, and stinks up the bathroom.”
“Ewww, gross.”
“Hey, I tell it like I smell it.” Dill shifted his weight, and gazed past Peter’s shoulder. “You, uhhh…you think you can get me inside your house?”
“Uh, sure, I guess. Why?”
“I wanna see inside. But he can’t know about it, okay?”
“Your dad?”
“Well, him, too, but I meant your grandfather.”
“Why?”
Dill bit his lip. “There was…an accident.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I kind of lit his garden on fire last year,” Dill explained.
“WHAT?”
“It was an accident! I was trying to scare something out of there. Didn’t work so good.”
A thrill of fear gripped Peter’s chest. “Scare what out?”
Dill looked to the right and the left, as though he were afraid of who might be listening.
“There’s something weird going on in his garden at night,” Dill whispered. “Especially the watermelon patch. That’s what I lit on fire. Well, first I lit the corn, but the watermelon patch was right next to it. You ever seen a watermelon explode?”
“No.”
“It’s coooool.” Dill grinned, eyes wide. Then he stopped grinning. “But it’s reeeeaaaally messy. And LOUD. You can’t exactly hide watermelons exploding.”
“What were you trying to scare out?”
“I don’t know, exactly…but I can show you tonight.”
What in the world was Dill talking about? A stray dog? A bear? His voice was way too spooky and low for it to be some normal kind of animal.
Peter hesitated, then relented. “Okay, I – ”
“BOY!” boomed an old man’s voice.
Peter swung around to see Grandfather striding towards him.
“Oh CRAP,” Dill hissed, and shrunk down behind the fence. “Look, meet me out here at ten o’clock tonight, okay?”
“But what – ”
“I gotta go, man, I gotta GO!”
Dill scampered off across his yard and raced inside the one-story house. The screen door slammed shut behind him.
Grandfather stomped up to the fence and switched his glare from Dill’s house to Peter’s face.
“I don’t want to see you having anything to do with that idjit, you hear me?”
Peter backed up a foot.
“H-he seems okay…”
“He’s a ruffian and a scoundrel and a troublemaker. You hear me, boy?” he thundered at Dill’s house. “I haven’t forgotten those watermelons, you little mongrel!”
From somewhere in Dill’s house came a man’s voice, sleepy and irritated. “Shut up, old man!”
“He’s a fool, a scamp, a rapscallion!” Grandfather railed at the unseen voice. “With parents to match!”
“Shuuuuuut UP!” the man’s voice roared.
Peter blushed a deep red and put his head in his hands.
Oh my God, Dill was right…he is crazy.
“In the house with you!” Grandfather snarled. “Git!”
Peter walked to the front door with the old man’s claw clamped down on his shoulder. All the way there, he wondered what awful thing he’d done for God to make him move in with an insane person.
4
If the house was crazy outside, it was double crazy inside. Maybe triple crazy.
The main hallway was three stories high. A giant wooden staircase angled up to the left until it reached the second floor, then sloped up to the right until it reached the third. Peter could imagine Dill having tons of fun sliding down the banister from the top floor all the way to the bottom – if the railing had curved around instead of jutting out at sharp angles. Peter pictured Dill tumbling off into space at the first hairpin turn and shuddered.
To the left there was a living room with antique furniture and stained glass lamps. A giant Arabic rug covered the polished hardwood floor, and a coffee table with a glass plate in the middle sat in the center of the room.
On the right side of the hallway was a cavernous dining hall with a table that looked like it could have served 30 people or more.
Under the stairwell was a door with an ancient lock, the kind in old movies that opened with skeleton keys. Peter gave it a glance and was about to walk on when his Grandfather clamped a hand on his shoulder again.
“We have some rules around here, boy. Number one is you are to NEVER ENTER THAT DOOR.”
Peter looked at it with new interest.
“You are never to try to open that door, you are never to play with that door, you are never to TOUCH that door. ON PAIN OF DEATH. Do I make myself clear?”
Peter stepped back. “Why?”
“And you are never to ASK ABOUT THAT DOOR.”
Peter looked from his Grandfather to the door and back again.
“Very well, moving on,” Grandfather muttered and started up the stairs. Peter followed.
“There are many, many rooms in this house,” Grandfather growled. “If a door is shut, DON’T OPEN IT. If a door is locked, DON’T BOTHER IT. There are plenty of open rooms for you to go in and destroy, which I know you will.”
They reached the second story. The hall stretched off a very long way in either direction, longer than Peter would have thought possible.
“Are we going down there to – ”
“No.”
Grandfather continued up the stairs.
As he reached the third story, Peter looked down at the hardwood floor thirty feet below. He got a little dizzy. Actually he got really dizzy, and had to look away until he was off the stairs and safely on the third floor.
Grandfather pointed to an open doorway as he walked by. “That is your mother’s.”
Peter peered in on a windowless room with a large canopy bed and paintings of bowls of fruit.
“Next to it is your sister’s.”
That room was windowless, too, and nothing Beth would want. The walls were dark purple, the furniture was straight out of George Washington’s time, and the only painting on the wall was of three women in white robes knitting a long piece of cloth. One of them held golden scissors over the thread, waiting to cut it.
Grandfather wasn’t so good with little girls, Peter was guessing.
“And this is yours.”
Whoa.
It was almost as big as his mother’s, with a large bed along the center wall and a writing desk and lamp in the corner. But the main thing was the giant window across the room, which poured sunlight onto the floor. Even better was a perch in front of the window, a pillow-lined ledge set
two feet into the wall, perfect for sitting and watching on a rainy day.
Peter hopped up on it and looked outside. Beyond the glass panes were the branches of an enormous tree, just right for climbing. Peter had never snuck out in his life, but that tree was the perfect way to do it.
Not that he had the faintest inclination to try. In fact, when he looked at the ground over thirty feet below, he got woozy even thinking about it – just like on the stairwell – and had to look away again.
The view was amazing. Behind the house, a vast field stretched for a quarter mile until it just ended, as though it dropped off into the light blue sky.
There was Dill’s house off to the right, completely visible from front to back. The roof was missing shingles here and there, and generally looked as rundown from above as it did from the ground level, but the place had a backyard as big as a soccer field – and with next to nothing in it. A rusty metal swing set and concrete patio kept the weeds company before the overgrown grass gave way to miles and miles of forest.
Separating Grandfather’s property from the tiny house was the rickety fence where Peter had met Dill just moments before. Its sagging rails and leaning posts stretched down the meadow for hundreds of yards, then finally collapsed in a jumble of rotting logs beneath the overhanging tree branches.
Back in Grandfather’s yard, an untrimmed barrier of rose bushes lined the rear of the house. Even from this height, Peter could see the different colored blooms: red, pink, yellow, white, and a dozen variations.
Funny, Grandfather didn’t seem like the kind of guy to grow roses.
“I’m surprised Mom didn’t want this room for herself,” Peter mused.
“Everyone gets the rooms I assign them.”
“Why’d you give me the one with the window?”
“In case anything ever came through it, I figured you’d handle it best.”
Peter stared at his grandfather for a hint of a smile, any indication of a joke. There was none.
Okaaaaay…
Peter turned back to the window.
A hundred feet beyond the roses was what he guessed to be the garden Dill had mentioned. It was surprisingly large, almost as big as a football field, but overgrown and wild-looking, with a forest of green corn stalks standing guard over twisted mounds of vines. Here and there were bright green specks that could have been watermelons, he supposed.
Bottle Full Of Scorpions Page 16
