The House on Hoarder Hill

by Mikki Lish

  Hedy and Spencer nervously unscrewed each cap and withdrew the mystery items inside. Not all were unpleasant, although it was creepy to hold things that belonged to a dead man they’d never met. After the tooth and the nail, they found a pocket watch, inside which was a very small photograph of a smiling, bald baby and its smiling mother.

  “Who’re they?” Spencer asked.

  But Nobody wouldn’t say. Curtly he told Spencer to place it on the floor. After the pocket watch was a gold ring, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, a necktie of paisley print in blues and reds, and a lock of brown hair tied with a length of fine black ribbon. Finally, Hedy loosened the cap on the last compartment and reached inside. It was like touching a large raisin, but when she pulled it out, it was gray in color, with a blob of darker color in one spot.

  “Now I shall see,” purred Nobody.

  Hedy dropped the thing, feeling queasy.

  “What is it?” Spencer asked.

  “An eyeball,” Hedy said. She desperately wanted to wash her hands—for hours, days, maybe even until the New Year came.

  When Nobody insisted the eyeball be moved to a spot between the ring and the nail, completing the circle, Hedy nudged it in with the toe of one shoe. Royal-blue light radiated from the center of the chandelier, illuminating the relics on the floor.

  “What’s happening?” Hedy asked.

  “All these questions,” Nobody grated. “No wonder your parents left you here. Now get out!”

  What do we do, Hedy?”

  Spencer was too afraid to sleep in his own bed. He took some puffs on his inhaler, lobbed his pillow to the bottom of Hedy’s mattress, and crawled under the covers with his feet toward her head. Hedy couldn’t sleep either and sat with her back to the wall, fidgeting with the card that had been slipped into her pocket at the Palisade.

  “The golden hands said we should ask Nobody for help,” she said. “I guess that means Nobody was telling the truth …”

  “Which means Grandpa John did it,” Spencer finished.

  Hedy scrunched down under the duvet, feeling a chill come over her that had nothing to do with it being a winter’s night. She pictured all the times that Grandma Rose had come up in conversation and tried to recall Grandpa John’s face. He had never seemed anything more than lost in grief and yearning for her. Was he simply the world’s greatest actor?

  From her notebook, she pulled out the article that Jelly had printed for them. And there it was. They had overlooked it completely: a dark empty spot in the sheer side of the Kaleidos that should have held a glittering cube. She stared miserably at the faces of young John and Rose beaming at each other. Was John’s smile fake?

  Maybe if she broke the problem down, this helpless feeling would vanish. Grabbing a red marker, Hedy began writing in the margins of the page. Down one side, she scrawled, Where is the cube? and down the other, Where is the Kaleidos? At the bottom, below Grandpa John, she wrote simply, Why?

  It was a short list. Instead of feeling inspired by it, she felt more bleak than ever.

  “So what do we do, Hedy?” Spencer repeated.

  “We’ll think of something tomorrow.”

  The following morning, they woke late. No great ideas had come to them in the night, and they stayed in bed for a long time, until finally Hedy’s stomach grumbled even more loudly than Spencer’s.

  “Do you have any food in here?” Spencer asked.

  “Nothing. I guess we’d better go down.”

  “Do you think Grandpa John’s finished breakfast yet?”

  “Maybe.” Hedy reluctantly turned back the corner of her duvet, and they made their way from their bedroom to the hall, to the stairs, and down. The blackness that had enveloped them during Nobody’s card show last night had left its mark: Spencer insisted on turning on all the lights to banish the shadows.

  Grandpa John looked up with a smile when they walked into the kitchen. Spencer kept behind Hedy as much as he could, mumbling “Good morning” into his chest before clamming up. Hedy had to agree to porridge for both of them as Spencer just stared at the top of the wooden table, speechless.

  “What’s wrong, my boy?” Grandpa John asked, concerned.

  After an awkward pause, Hedy said, “He didn’t sleep very well.”

  Grandpa John nodded in understanding. “Breakfast will help. And then what about a ramble to Foxwood today?” He turned to the worktop to make a start on their oats.

  “Act normal!” Hedy told Spencer under her breath.

  “But I’m scared,” he whispered back.

  “He’s never tried to hurt us.” As she said it, the assurance settled over her enough to make her doubt, just a little, what Nobody had shown them last night.

  By the time he got to the bottom of his bowl of porridge, Spencer looked a bit brighter, although he still hadn’t said a word. Hedy had been thinking as she ate, mulling over the magnetic letters on the fridge, long since scrambled and the message lost. Wouldn’t Grandma Rose have warned them that Grandpa John had done it? Or did she not know? Questions kept battling in her head, first from one side of the theory, then the other.

  Once she had finished and cleaned her bowl, Hedy went to sit by the liar bird chicks that were tucked in a large cardboard box in the warmest corner of the kitchen. Grandpa John had already fed them, and they were sleeping contentedly.

  “Grandpa,” she began. Her voice, nervous, came out too loud and croaky. She tried again. “Grandpa, do you know who was behind Grandma Rose disappearing?”

  The teaspoon in Grandpa John’s hand clattered to the worktop. Hedy shrank into herself, feeling how clumsy the question sounded, asked out of the blue.

  “We’ve spoken about this before.” Grandpa John frowned. “Why do you ask?”

  Hedy shrugged. “Well, do you?”

  “What a curious way to start the day.” He seemed uneasy. Was it because of the liar birds? “If I had known, I would have done something about it.”

  One fluffy liar bird chick rustled and fluffed, barely opening an eye before settling back into sleep with its siblings. Hedy couldn’t tell if it was a reaction to Grandpa John’s answer or not. A part of her didn’t want to know.

  The phone rang in the hallway, and Grandpa John hurried away with some relief to answer it.

  “What do you think?” Spencer whispered. “Is he guilty?”

  Hedy frowned. “He didn’t really answer the question, did he?”

  Spencer turned his spoon over and over in his hand. “Can we call Mom and Dad? Ask them to come home early?”

  “And tell them what?”

  “Tell them everything!”

  “But we’ve got Nobody helping us look for Grandma Rose now,” Hedy reminded him.

  In the hallway, Grandpa John was murmuring excitedly to the person on the other end of the line. Hedy edged closer to the hallway entrance to eavesdrop. “No, of course I still want it,” Grandpa John was saying, “but does it have to be today? I have my grandchildren staying with me …”

  Spencer sneaked to Hedy’s side to listen as well.

  “No, no, there’s no need for that, I’ll take it,” Grandpa John continued. “Let me make some arrangements.” He hung up the phone, paused for a moment, and then dialed a number. “Hello, it’s me,” he said shortly. “Can you look after Hedy and Spencer for a couple of hours? This morning …”

  Spencer glanced at Hedy questioningly, and she mouthed back, Uncle Peter. When Grandpa John hung up the phone, they scurried back to their seats at the table and tried to look surprised when he announced they were going for a drive. “I’ll have to drop you off at Peter’s for a short visit. Just while I pick something up.”

  “We could stay here by ourselves,” Hedy suggested, thinking of what they might achieve in a few precious hours alone.

  Grandpa John looked at her askance. “This isn’t the same as me popping down to the village. Go on, now, get dressed.”

  Upstairs, the children brushed their teeth and quickly dressed. When
Spencer threw back his duvet to look for his socks, he let out a yelp of surprise. “What’s this?” he asked, turning to Hedy and pointing.

  It was a small statue head that took Hedy a few seconds to place. “That’s the head from the Roman chariot guy,” she said slowly. “The figurine in Doug and Stan’s room.”

  “What’s it doing in my bed?” Spencer bent low to study it. “Oh, I know. The Woodspies must have put it there.”

  “I guess so,” Hedy said. “I didn’t know they could get up there, though. The bed isn’t wood.”

  Spencer smiled for the first time that morning. “It’s like an offering to a king.”

  Hedy pocketed the article on which she had written their short list of matters to investigate. Perhaps Uncle Peter would know something.

  Shouldering their backpacks, the children headed downstairs, but on their way past Doug and Stan’s room, they heard a muffled, outraged grunt. They paused. Hearing Grandpa John on the bottom floor, it seemed safe enough to open the door and quickly check on their friends.

  “Are you all right, guys?” Spencer whispered.

  “Far from it!” Stan exclaimed from the wall. “Look!”

  Sticking out of his poor nose were three darts. The feathers on the ends of the darts bounced around as Stan tried to get rid of them by screwing up his nose.

  “Skewered out of nowhere, he was,” Doug rumbled from the floor.

  “Are they magic darts?” Spencer asked.

  “Never showed a whiff of enchantment before,” Doug said. “They’ve been in this room, still as you please, for years now. Something threw them.”

  “Something cruel,” added Stan hotly. “I thought I’d seen the last of sharp objects coming out of nowhere when that blasted hunter got me. It’s not even a sport, what with me immobilized on this wall.”

  Doug shook his head. “Whatever it was, it had good aim.”

  While the bear and the stag talked, the children hastily built another tower of boxes so that Hedy could reach up and pluck the darts from Stan’s nose. “Thank you,” Stan said gratefully.

  “No problem,” Hedy said, not meeting the stag’s eye. An uncomfortable notion was growing in the back of her mind, one that she didn’t want to give voice to.

  “Hedy, Grandpa’s calling us,” said Spencer nervously, one ear to the door.

  Stan cleared his throat anxiously. “Take those darts away, won’t you? Get rid of them.”

  “The Lord of the Queen’s Wood’s had enough of Stab the Stag,” Doug joked, humor restored now that the darts had been removed from his friend.

  Stan threw him a sour look. “You’d better hope you’re not next, you mangy mat.”

  Leaving the two animals to trade insults, Hedy closed the door and shooed Spencer to the stairs. Halfway down the hallway Spencer asked, “Hedy, who would do that to Stan?” Then he suddenly halted and grabbed Hedy’s wrist. “It was Nobody, wasn’t it? He threw the darts—and left the head in my bed.”

  Uncle Peter lived in Portsall, about forty minutes’ drive away. It lay toward the coast, and there was a faint salt tang in the air when Spencer wound down his window. Like their trip to Stradmoor, arriving in Portsall made Hedy feel displaced somehow, as though she had been in space and missed everything that had happened on Earth for a few days. She’d been quiet for most of the drive, her mind chewing over the figurine head and the darts, but mostly over Nobody’s card trick, and what it could mean about Grandpa John.

  When they arrived at a wide terrace house of brown brick with a white-trimmed bay window, Hedy and Spencer gladly scrambled out of the car. Within moments, Uncle Peter was opening the front door. “Welcome to the fun house!” he bellowed.

  He stepped to one side, and out popped Jelly and Max.

  “Surprise!” yelled Max as he tried to get Spencer to chase him.

  Jelly threw an arm around Hedy. “We only live a few streets away, and Mom said we could come over, seeing as you were going to be here.”

  “It’s about time you visited me, John,” Uncle Peter said. “Like some tea before you head off?”

  “No, thank you, I’m expected elsewhere,” Grandpa John said shortly. “Be good, won’t you, kids? Don’t touch anything.”

  Uncle Peter let out an amused snort. “Of course they can touch things, as long as they don’t break them!”

  Grandpa John pursed his lips, then muttered, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” He told Hedy and Spencer he’d be back in around two hours, and then hurried to his car.

  “Do you know where Grandpa John is going, Uncle Peter?” Hedy asked. “He wouldn’t tell us.”

  “Not a word to me either, I’m afraid.” Uncle Peter tugged his beard. “He keeps his secrets from one and all.”

  Hedy and Spencer followed their cousins into a tidy mudroom, where they kicked off their shoes and hung their jackets, then into the house. The hallway smelled wonderful, like some sort of baked treat. Between the scent, and the racket of her cousins, some of the worry that had nagged at Hedy ebbed away.

  To the right of the hall was the front sitting room, where light from the window was partially blocked by the enormous Christmas tree, festooned with ornaments. Although there were many interesting things scattered around, the room was neat and inviting and ordinary—not a bit like Grandpa John’s cluttered house. There was a glossy black upright piano, a pair of leather couches, and side tables holding pictures of the cousins with their parents, Toni and Vincent.

  “Come and look at these,” Max said, dragging Spencer to three framed posters of a young Uncle Peter (Witness the Power of Magician Peter Sang!) that hung on the far wall. Hedy peered into a tall bookcase with glass doors. It was filled with intriguing things: weathered stone plaques carved with symbols, a small sheathed knife made of silver, brightly colored enamel eggs with gold filigree, and a few different wooden masks, all with fierce expressions. One silver photo frame held a sepia photograph of none other than Tsang Li Ming.

  Uncle Peter spotted Hedy studying the picture. “That’s your great-great-grandfather.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Only twice. He was retired and living in China by the time I came along. He was a famous magician, you know.”

  “I think I heard that,” Hedy said carefully. “Is he why you and Grandpa John became magicians?”

  Uncle Peter thought. “I’d say he was the reason John became a magician, but the reason I became one was because of John.” He smiled at Hedy’s surprised look. “Brothers can be competitive.”

  As he bustled out of the room, Hedy noticed a small red bag that was, oddly, suspended above the fireplace. “What’s that?” she asked Jelly.

  “It’s a protective charm. It wards away evil,” Jelly said. “We have a bigger one at home too, but it’s packed up right now because of the renovations at home and there’s, like, dust everywhere. My nana makes them.”

  “Where is she?” Hedy asked curiously.

  “She lives in America, in New Orleans, where she’s from. She and Grandad divorced before I was born.” Jelly gazed wistfully at the charm for a moment before adding cheekily, “Your grandpa isn’t the only one who can make his wife disappear.” At Hedy’s scandalized look, she added, “What, too soon?”

  Hedy couldn’t help but dissolve into giggles, and Jelly took her by the arm to show her more of the house.

  Together, the five of them walked to a Chinese restaurant called the Emperor’s Court for a lunch of dumplings, “in honor of your great-great-grandfather,” Uncle Peter said. The restaurant owner made a great fuss of Uncle Peter, chatting and bringing the children pink lemonades and special dumplings that weren’t on the menu. Afterward, Uncle Peter took them to a nearby ice cream shop, where the manager came out from behind the counter to shake his hand and have a long chat. The manager had a large bucket of lollipops behind the counter and let all the children take a handful. Spencer, of course, filled his pockets. Uncle Peter basked in the attention like a benevolent king.
r />   As they ambled back home, Spencer fired questions at Uncle Peter about his career as a stage magician. With immense relish, he regaled them with stories about his performance for the royal family, turning a whole carriage into a pumpkin in the blink of an eye, and the time he used magic to foil a suspected Russian spy. Spencer soaked in every detail and forgot to lick his ice cream, so that butterscotch swirl melted down his hand. This is what holidays should be like, Hedy mused.

  Jelly pulled on Hedy’s sleeve to slow her down, and they walked a little way behind the others. “What’s the latest from Uncle John’s House of Horrors?”

  “It’s not a house of horrors!” Hedy whispered indignantly. She paused and then grudgingly admitted, “But we did find some creepy stuff.” She filled Jelly in on discovering Albert Nobody, and the revelation about Grandpa John.

  Jelly was gobsmacked. “You’re not going to go back to your grandpa’s, are you?”

  “I can’t not go back,” Hedy said.

  “If he’s responsible, and he hid it all this time, you can’t go back! Aren’t you afraid? You could stay with us. Oh, except Max is already bunking with me ’cause his room is being fixed up. But you could stay with my grandad. Want me to ask?”

  They had reached the house, and Uncle Peter was waiting for them at the front door. Hedy shook her head firmly at her cousin, not knowing yet what she should do. She was fearful, yes, but what would happen to Grandma Rose if Hedy and Spencer weren’t there? Would Nobody still look for the Kaleidos and its missing piece?

  Hedy and Jelly found the boys upstairs in the room where Uncle Peter kept his old costumes, posters, and props. “Can you show me how this works?” Spencer was asking Max, holding up a magician’s birdcage. It collapsed just as he said it, painfully pinching his fingers, and they had to call Uncle Peter for help.

  “Magic is a dangerous calling,” Uncle Peter warned as he released Spencer’s fingers.

  Spencer tried to shake the sting away. “That’s what Grandpa says. But this is just a trick, isn’t it?”

  Max had turned his attention to an iridescent dark green cape that he arranged around his shoulders. “Hedy, did you try those wings again? Did you manage to make them work?”