Happy Halloween.
Ordinarily, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith would never have allowed such mayhem, but with all of the recorded sound effects echoing around the neighborhood, they never imagined that the screaming in their basement was real. Besides, the boys eventually released their captives, none of whom had actually been hurt.
Sure, all of them had wet their pants. But what was Halloween for if not to scare the pee out of a few bullies?
Especially if it embarrassed them enough that they didn’t show their faces on the street for the rest of the night.
None of the neighborhood’s trick-or-treaters was robbed of candy, all the jack-o’-lanterns made it through the night, and nobody had to scrub streaks of egg off their windows or cars.
Best of all, the bullies learned an important lesson about themselves…and Edgar and Allan.
“There’ll be no more dungeons for you two!” Uncle Jack said when he learned how far they had gone to terrify.
The twins didn’t bother to explain all the reasons why they’d done it. Adults almost never approved of such methods, no matter how good the cause. So as the lecture had continued, they simply hung their heads (knowing their uncle needed to think his occasional tirades actually frightened them). And after cleaning it all up, Edgar and Allan hid the painted panels and other horrific props in the rafters of the attic, because they suspected a time might come when reconstructing the dungeon would serve their purposes.
In this, they were not wrong.
Later that week, Aunt Judith announced that she had hired workmen to set up a home school in the basement, the earlier setting of the Halloween horrors.
The result was three days of hammering, sawing, and drilling that Edgar and Allan thought could have been reduced to a more efficient two days’ labor (saving their aunt and uncle a few bucks), if only the sweating workmen had been willing to take a little of the twins’ advice.
But the carpet layers didn’t want to hear about the chemistry of adhesives, the carpenter didn’t have the slightest interest in the optimal angle, geometrically speaking, for a miter saw, and the electrician didn’t seem to care in the least about the activity of the subatomic particles in the wiring he installed.
Instead, the workmen banned Allan and Edgar from the site (even their friend Stevie Harrison, who came over one afternoon to help build an astrolabe out of old compact discs, was denied access to the basement).
It was a frustrating three days.
But the boys needn’t have worried.
At 8:30 a.m. on the second Tuesday of November, Edgar, Allan, and Roderick were allowed to go downstairs. The workmen were gone. In their place waited Aunt Judith, no longer in her morning velour sweatsuit but dressed like a real teacher. One would never guess it was the same person.
Or the same room! Cheerfully lit, the basement had a new carpet, two student-sized desks, one teacher’s desk, whiteboards, maps, built-in bookshelves, and an overhead projector—but no computers, because the boys’ hacking skills were not to be trifled with.
“Like it, boys?” Aunt Judith asked proudly.
“Well, it’s not exactly a lecture hall at Oxford, but it’s not bad,” Allan said.
As a final brightening touch, Aunt Judith had purchased a set of six posters that featured cuddly animals and cheery sayings. She motioned for the boys to take their seats, and then used a letter opener to slit open the package of posters. Then she took one out, unfolded it, and displayed it.
“Well, what else could it be but the first day of the rest of your life?” Edgar asked from a cross-legged position atop his desk.
“It’s meant to be encouraging,” she answered as she smoothed out the poster.
“What if your life is one of misery?” Allan inquired, identically cross-legged atop his desk. “Isn’t the first day of yet more misery actually quite depressing?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Aunt Judith said in her teacher tone of voice. “The poster refers to each day being a fresh start.”
“OK,” Edgar said, happy to put off any actual schoolwork. “What if your life has been good up to now and this new day is the start of your decline into misery and madness?”
“The poster says nothing about misery or madness!”
“But it doesn’t say anything about happiness, either,” Allan responded.
“Actually, it doesn’t say anything at all,” Edgar concluded, standing and taking the poster from his aunt. Carefully, he refolded it into a square no larger than a notebook page. “You should try to get your money back for this one.”
Reluctantly, Aunt Judith took the next poster from the package.
“Let’s have a look,” Allan said.
Edgar nodded. “They’re probably all just as bad.”
Soon all but the last poster had been opened and then refolded, rejected. Pictures of panda bears, adorable raccoons, and fuzzy puppies spouting sweet, optimistic sayings were all stacked beside the teacher’s-edition textbooks on Aunt Judith’s desk. However, the final poster in the package was another matter.
“What’s this?” she asked, baffled. “They must have made a mistake at the factory.”
Like the others, the poster had a picture of a cuddly animal—this time, a sleeping, fluffy white kitten. Nothing unusual about that. But the words underneath the picture, written in stark, gothic script, suggested neither folksy wisdom nor heartfelt encouragement. In fact, they made no sense at all:
Even Roderick Usher, sitting regally atop a bookshelf beside a paperweight shaped like a raven, looked inquiringly across the room at the nonsensical poster.
“Why would someone beware a cute little cat napping?” Aunt Judith asked. “Sleeping kittens are precious. And they nap all the time.” She looked over at the bookshelf. “Right, Roderick?”
Roderick stood and stretched, his expression noncommittal.
After a moment, she shrugged and refolded the poster. “Oh well, it must just be a mistake.”
But the boys didn’t dismiss it so quickly.
They took a particular (some might say “peculiar”) interest in things that others disregarded as mere mistakes, because they believed that oddities and seeming coincidences were actually the world’s way of communicating secret messages.
Sometimes these messages were simple to decode. Once, in downtown Baltimore, the boys had noticed a theater marquee on which two of the electrified characters had burned out. A new play about the poet Emily Dickinson, The Poet’s Rule, was advertised instead on the faulty marquee as:
“Darn right we rule,” the boys had observed.
Edgar and Allan discovered messages in many places. Broken billboards, half-blown-away skywriting, misprinted lists of ingredients on the backs of cereal boxes. Adults usually categorized such thinking as “overactive imagination.” But the boys knew that if you consider everything with an open and inquisitive eye, then at the very least you ensure that the world is never boring.
“OK,” Allan mused. “What might this cat poster be trying to say to us?”
“Well, what threat can a sleeping cat pose?” Edgar asked. “Why should one ‘beware’ it?”
“It’s just a misprint, boys,” Aunt Judith said.
They weren’t so sure.
“Maybe we should ask ourselves to whom a sleeping cat might be a threat?” Edgar suggested.
“Of course!” Allan slapped himself in the forehead as if it should have been obvious.
“A sleeping cat is a threat only to a dream mouse,” the boys said in unison.
High fives.
“Dream mouse?” Aunt Judith asked, confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
They shrugged. “Maybe we should ask the rodent expert,” Allan suggested, with a glance at the bookshelf.
“Well, Roderick?” Edgar prodded.
Once again, Roderick Usher was noncommittal.
Aunt Judith clapped her hands in her best teacher style. “All right, enough of this lollygagging.” She set the sleeping
-kitten poster aside and picked up a sheet of paper from her desktop. “This is a letter from the Baltimore School District.” She waved it in the air before flattening it on her desk to read. “It says that in seven days a representative will visit us to evaluate our ‘educational environment and processes’ in order to give final approval for our home school. It’s important, boys. So let’s get started.”
For Aunt Judith’s sake, they sighed and took their seats.
Hours later, upstairs in their room, the twins wrote a note to their former classmates:
The Seventh Grade Class
c/o Stevie Harrison
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Middle School
345 Carmello Court
Baltimore, MD 21215
Hi, colleagues,
Since we still aren’t allowed to use computers or cell phones (who’d have thought that changing the numbers for every cell phone on the East Coast would be such a big deal?) snail mail will have to suffice. Oh well, it’s not as if we have anything very timely to report here at “Aunt Judith Academy.” She’s doing her best, but it’s not exactly Hogwarts.
Anyway, we appreciate the “Save the Poe Twins” petition you all got together, even if Mr. Mann tore it up. Uncle Jack thinks we’ll be back in class next school year. That’s only ten months away (or seven, if you don’t count summer vacation). In the meantime, who’s looking out for you guys? And who’s keeping things interesting?
If only a little adventure would come knocking on our door…. But that only happens in stories, right?
Bye for now,
E and A
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…
From the Desk of
PROFESSOR S. PANGBORN PERRY, PHD
NOTES FOR EXPERIMENT
a) Recent scientific experiments indicate that a tiny, subatomic particle afloat in space may be paired up with another like particle in such a way that if the two are separated, even by distances as wide as the whole universe, they still remain mysteriously connected. Whatever affects one affects the other, simultaneously. What joins them, even when they’re apart? It’s a mystery…. But it’s real. Scientists call it “quantum entanglement.” Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
b) Now, imagine if the two joined objects were not mere particles but human beings. Two bodies, two locations, but one shared mind…. You could send one halfway across the world and the other would still know what his partner was seeing, thinking, doing. And vice versa. Instantaneous communication…Imagine the possibilities for political, scientific, economic, and military power!
THE FOLLOWING IS
THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION:
What happens if one of the entangled pair of boys is not merely removed from his brother to some distant location on the earth but is killed? Will the remaining boy suddenly know nothing more of his deceased partner? Or, as I believe, will he still be linked to his brother and thereby linked to the mysterious world of the dead, the “afterlife”?
Imagine the power to be gained by controlling the remaining boy and thereby gaining private communication with the next world. The only price for such an endeavor would be the death of one of two boys who are so identical that to kill one would merely be to correct a redundancy. Truly, who needs both Edgar and Allan Poe in our world? Yes, this is the secret purpose of my experiment. To gain control of the two boys, terminate one, communicate with the realm of the dead via the captive brother, and thereby rule both worlds!
At this moment, the plan is proceeding with clockwork precision….
LESSONS IN HORROR
THE boys’ homeschooling went well the first week, even if they had to slow down a bit to accommodate their Aunt Judith. Then Roderick Usher went missing.
Edgar and Allan looked everywhere for him, even checking inside the walls to ensure that their poor cat had not somehow been walled up alive, as one of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s most famous stories, “The Black Cat,” had involved just such a terrifying incident.
But they found nothing.
Allan and Edgar were distraught.
Roderick was special—and not just because he was the last gift their mom and dad ever gave them.
Over the past seven years, Edgar and Allan had taught him many tricks. There was the Stuffed Cat, where he froze on command. (His cue was two lines from one of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s poems, “Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche, how statue-like I see thee stand.”) Roderick could hold a pose for so long that visitors often mistook him for a work of taxidermy, and their shock when he seemed to come suddenly to life (cued by a finger snap) was very gratifying.
Also, Roderick was born able to imitate the sound of various birds, which proved helpful to his expeditions through the tangled branches of the neighborhood trees. Edgar and Allan added many other sounds to his repertoire, including monkey calls, hissing snakes, crying babies, barking dogs, and whistling teakettles. Who knew when the odd sound effect might come in handy?
But their cat’s most useful talent was untying knots with his unusually strong and agile paws. The cue was the twins’ whistling “Ring Around the Rosy.” The Knot Trick was especially entertaining down at the Baltimore docks, where he was able to fray, unravel, and then unknot even the thickest rope to release moored yachts. The boys loved watching yachtsmen in sport jackets and leather deck shoes toss their cocktails aside and dive into the water to swim after their receding boats.
And Roderick could work wonders with smaller knots as well, which made him a great help around the house. When Uncle Jack’s back was so painful that he couldn’t bend over, Roderick untied his sneakers for him. Aunt Judith, a semi-professional knitter, relied on the cat’s help whenever a project snarled.
After Roderick disappeared, Allan and Edgar barely slept or ate.
Fortunately, just a few days after the disappearance, Aunt Judith got a phone call with the good news that Roderick had apparently wandered into a delivery truck and survived for days on leftover fast food that the driver had tossed carelessly into the back of the cab.
He was alive and well in Kansas.
What a relief!
Naturally, Aunt Judith offered to pay for Roderick’s return via airplane, but the man who had found him refused.
“What’s he want, a ransom?” Uncle Jack asked that night at dinner, when he heard the story. “Is he some kind of nut?”
“Not at all,” the boys answered. Aunt Judith already had filled them in on the details of her conversation. “He’s an animal lover.”
“Who is he?” their uncle asked, tucking his napkin into his shirt.
The boys tossed onto the table a brochure that the man had faxed a few hours before. “He’s the owner and operator of some kind of Wizard of Oz–themed amusement park in Kansas. It’s called the Dorothy Gale Farm and OZitorium,” said Allan. “It’s also his home.”
“He goes by the somewhat unoriginal name of Professor Marvel,” Edgar added.
“So he is a nutcase,” Uncle Jack remarked.
“No! He’s an animal lover!”
They explained that the professor believed it would be cruel to lock Roderick inside a small cage stowed in the dark belly of an airplane along with luggage and airmail and who-knew-what-else. And the boys agreed. It reminded them of another of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s stories, “The Premature Burial,” in which a poor soul suffers the horrors of believing he has been buried alive in a coffin. Their cat simply could not undergo such a fearful experience.
“But flying’s the best way to travel, boys,” Uncle Jack said as he forked a pile of spaghetti onto his plate. “For cats as well as humans.”
“Not for our cat,” Allan answered, stabbing his knife into the rubbery chicken parmesan that sat beside the spaghetti. “Imagine what it would feel like to be locked inside a little box, Uncle Jack. Have you no heart? Imagine being in a coffin, buried under six feet of cold, damp earth.”
“Nobody’s talking about buryi
ng your cat,” Uncle Jack replied evenly.
“But putting him in a pet carrier is like walling him into a stone tomb,” Edgar said as he picked all the mushrooms out of the sauce on his plate. “Imagine the darkness, the stale air, the frigid chill, the terror.”
“So what do you two propose we do?” With a sigh, Uncle Jack put down his fork and picked up the grainy black-and-white fax of the brochure for the Gale Farm and OZitorium. “You want to leave the poor animal with this crazy professor?”
“No,” the boys replied. “We want to drive there to pick him up, and then we’ll drive him home.”
“Drive?” Uncle Jack replied, dumbfounded. “That’s thirteen hundred miles away!”
“But Uncle Jack, please—”
“Are you two sure this isn’t an excuse to visit this weird amusement park?”
Edgar snatched up the fax and read aloud. “‘Visitors will discover on our grounds the actual home of Dorothy Gale, famous heroine of the beloved Oz story.’”
Aunt Judith narrowed her eyes. “How can it be the ‘actual’ home of Dorothy Gale when she was a fictional character?”
Edgar continued, “‘In addition, we offer a live musical production of The Wizard of Oz, performed daily.’” He tossed the brochure back onto the table. “Does that sound like someplace my brother and I would ever want to visit, Uncle Jack?”
“Actually, yes—it’s just the sort of place you two would find funny.”
“Just the sort of place where you could wreak havoc,” Aunt Judith added knowingly.
“Driving twenty-five hundred miles round trip is out of the question,” Uncle Jack declared. “And that’s final.”
“But Uncle Jack—”
Aunt Judith didn’t let them finish. “Can’t this discussion wait until tomorrow?” Her voice was uncharacteristically edgy.
“But Roderick—”
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