The Tilting House

by Tom Llewellyn

  “So we climb into the Olds and we drive all the way up Meridian Street to the town of Graham, where this friend of his lives. We pull up and I see it’s a furniture shop: Lennis and Company.”

  “Lennis? That’s who made our dining room set!” said Aaron.

  “Right. The porch swing, too, I bet. Anyway, we walk into the barn and there’s Lennis all covered in sawdust, working at a wood lathe, sawdust sticking to the sweat all over his bald head. He brushes off enough of the dust to shake hands with the doc and asks how the doc’s new kitchen cabinets are working out. Dr. Bruell tells him they’re wonderful, but that he wants to talk about a different kind of project. He goes on to tell Lennis my story and asks him if he can make me a wooden leg.

  “Now, I’m not sure if I’m keen on the idea, but neither one of them seems to care much what I think. Old Lennis, he stares me up and down. He measures all over my good leg with complicated metal calipers, and he makes all sorts of notes in his little notebook. Then he rolls up my pants and takes a look at my stump. Asks me a few questions about where it hurts. He asks if he can take a look at my remaining foot. He draws a bunch of pictures of it and measures each toe with tiny little clamps and tapes and pieces of string. Dr. Bruell gives him one of my old right shoes, which he had brought along without telling me. Lennis says, ‘Got a nice piece of kiln-dried maple. Was going to turn it into a pedestal for a kitchen table, but it might work all right for this, too. Gimme a couple of weeks.’

  “Sure enough, two weeks later, there’s a knock on the door and Lennis is standing there holding my wooden leg. This same one here. Same leather pad on top. Same straps. Same rusty metal hinge for the knee. Said he made the hinge out of an old saw blade. Carved the ankle and the toes and even carved in the toenails. See? Took me a while to figure out how to use it without falling over, and I still hobble around like a three-legged dog, but ol’ Lennis and me, we do okay together. Heck, if I can walk around in this dad-blamed funhouse we all live in now, then I guess I got no right to complain.”

  Grandpa looked down forlornly at his unlit pipe. He stood up and headed for the front porch. “In a funny way, you might say this ol’ leg has come home. To this house, where it has the company of the dining room set. This leg and that dining set are brothers, come from the same maker.”

  “Is that a true story?” Aaron asked.

  “You insult me, boy,” said Grandpa, striking a match as he reached the front door. “Course it’s true. Ain’t interesting enough to be a lie. Now hush up and let your brother get himself some rest.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I broke out with red bumps around my armpits and behind my ears. Mom took me to see Dr. Trumble, who diagnosed me with Teufelskreis measles. The doctor ordered Aaron, Dad, and Grandpa to stay out of the house for two weeks, so they moved in with our friends the Mullens, who lived across town. Mom could stay, because she’d had Teufelskreis measles when she was a little girl. Dad came by Tilton House after work to keep painting the exteriors, but he wasn’t allowed to come inside.

  I hated living away from Aaron that long. Aaron drove me crazy sometimes, but I missed him. While Aaron got to live at the Mullens’ house, with level floors and a hot tub in the backyard, I had to stay among the mad drawings and the tilting floors.

  The Teufelskreis measles made me miserable for the first three days. My eyes glazed over, my lips puffed up, and my joints swelled until I could no longer bend at the waist. It took a while, but the swelling and the red bumps slowly went away. After a week I felt fine and was more than ready to play outside.

  “Not a chance,” said Mom. “You’re contagious. And you could relapse, so you’re stuck in here with me for another whole week.”

  Besides Molly the cat, the only living thing I saw in fourteen days was Mom. I played all the board games, read all the books, watched all the TV shows, and dug through all the cupboards. I made a new collar for Molly out of braided shoelaces.

  Boredom forced me to study the scribbles on the walls. They were scrawled everywhere—even on the handrails going upstairs. But as I studied them, I noticed a surprising neatness. The diagrams were carefully drawn. The circles were perfectly round. The equations were tidily stacked. The scribbles didn’t look as crazy as I’d originally thought. Maybe they made sense after all.

  I decided to find out if I was right. I scoured the house for a diagram simple enough for me to understand. I found an equation that read like this:

  I had no idea what that meant but next to the equation was this:

  That made no sense to me either. Below that, though, was an unexpectedly simple diagram. It featured a wooden spool, three heavy washers, a very sharp pencil, and a couple of rubber bands. I tried to create the device with stuff I found in our kitchen junk drawer. After three tries and forty-five minutes, I ended up with something that looked like a spinning top, so I twisted some string around the wooden spool and gave it a tug.

  The top spun on the kitchen floor, tilt and all, for about ten minutes before it clattered onto its side and fell apart.

  That simple little top made me smile. Something in this house, insignificant as it was, had actually worked the way I’d hoped it would. I looked around the house for another diagram I could decipher, but all of them baffled me.

  “I’m bored again,” I said.

  “Why don’t you go read something?” Mom was sorting through a box of photographs in the living room.

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Enough already, Josh. Go play a game.”

  “Played them all.”

  “Then make yourself lunch. I’ve got some sliced provolone in the fridge. You could get a straw and poke little holes in it.”

  “I’m not hungry. And Aaron’s the one who pokes holes in cheese. Not me.”

  “You’re driving me crazy, Josh. There’s got to be something in this house you can do.”

  I thought for a moment. “Can I go up to the attic?”

  “Absolutely not. You’ll get bitten by a rat.”

  “All the rats moved next door,” I said. “Besides, I don’t think Mr. Daga would ever bite me.”

  “Well, you’ll get bitten by something.”

  “No, I won’t. And Dad said there’s still all sorts of weird old junk up there. Why can’t I look through it?”

  “Because I said so. You’d probably fall through the ceiling. Go do something else.”

  I shuffled up to my room and sat on the floor. I stared at the scribbles I hadn’t managed to cover over with posters. I was studying a diagram of a holly berry next to the words ilex aquifolium when I heard the back door slam. That meant Mom had gone outside to work in the garden. An impulse I couldn’t resist grabbed hold of me. I ran up the stairs to the All-the-Way-Up Room.

  I opened the hidden door, clicked the switch, and watched a lone bulb blush to life somewhere back in the gloom.

  The ceiling slanted low, forcing me to crouch. Stacks of boxes tilted everywhere, and shadowy shapes filled the corners. The attic space faded to blackness, far beyond the dim glow of the lightbulb.

  I rushed back to my room and dug through my drawers until I found a headlamp I used for camping. I stood motionless and listened for a minute, but the house was quiet. Mom was still outside.

  Using the headlamp to light the way, I crawled through the little door into the attic. In the boxes just inside the door I found:

  An old cloth flour bag full of pennies dated 1929. They all looked brand new, and there must have been a thousand of them.

  An envelope with old first, second, and third place ribbons for shot-putting at a New York high school track invitational.

  Boxes and boxes of books. Only two looked interesting—an old red book with an ornate cover decorated with gold holly leaves, and one called Handbook of United States Coins. Both were well chewed by rats.

  Coin albums completely devoid of coins. The rats had chewed these as well.

  A rusty three-inch pocketknife. I put this in my pocket.

 
Seven wigs. They all fit me.

  A carpenter’s level with a wedge of wood glued to the bottom on one end.

  A ship in a bottle. Only a jumble of wooden sticks and tangled string remained. Tiny rat droppings lay in the bottle, and I figured some of Mr. Daga’s kids had played on the ship and wrecked it.

  Matches from a restaurant called the Alt Heidelberg.

  All of these boxes sat within ten feet of the three-foot-high door. The attic went much farther back from that. I set the pennies and the wigs outside the door to play with later, took a deep breath, and began crawling into the darkness.

  The attic was tucked into the eaves, framing the walls of the All-the-Way-Up Room. I crawled for twenty feet and then reached a corner. I leaned as far forward as I could and peeked slowly around. Cobwebs glowed white in the beam of my headlamp. I crawled to where the roof met the slanted attic floor and found an abandoned bird’s nest surrounded by feathers and droppings. The floor creaked somewhere ahead. I glanced up and the light caught something white on a beam about twenty feet away. It looked like words.

  The attic smelled like rat droppings, but I took a deep breath and crawled toward the words. Every few feet, I had to crawl through an old web. I imagined spiders scurrying down my back, and it made me shiver. Finally, I crawled close enough to make out the words “three o’clock.”

  I’d always liked three o’clock. That was when school let out. I took it as a good sign and crawled closer. The letters looked like they were written in white chalk. I searched the beams nearby, but there were no other words. I looked along the bottom of the crawl space, where the beam touched the floor. Still nothing. I looked at the wall directly to the right of the words. There, in the same spidery letters and the same white chalk, was written “nine o’clock.”

  All nine o’clock meant to me was bedtime on a school night. I wondered what the time meant to the person who’d written it here. I searched the area around wall and found nothing but more cobwebs.

  I continued to crawl further into the darkness until I reached another corner. At that corner the floorboards stopped. The floor beams were spaced two feet apart with nothing between them but the plaster ceiling of the rooms below. I would have to crawl from beam to beam. If I missed a beam, I would fall through the ceiling. And if that happened Mom and Dad would kill me.

  Every time a board creaked, my stomach flipped. Hundreds of cobwebs waited for me. I had just decided to turn back when I saw more letters. Halfway up the wall to my left was written “six o’clock.” Directly below that, on one of the floor joists, was scribbled “nine o’clock.”

  Suddenly, the system made sense. The words were directions. On the face of a clock, three was on the right, nine was on the left, and six was straight down. All I had to do was imagine where the hour hand on a clock would point. But who had written the directions? And what did they lead to?

  I had to keep going. I crawled carefully from tilting floor beam to tilting floor beam, balancing on my hands and knees to keep from falling through the plaster ceiling into the room below. Halfway along, I reached the word “midnight.” Did midnight mean I should look straight ahead or straight up? I aimed my headlamp up but saw nothing. I shone it straight ahead and could barely make out another set of letters written on a beam far ahead.

  I prayed I wouldn’t slip as I stretched to reach each beam. My knees hurt. I finally made it to the words “six o’clock.” I looked down.

  Next to the beam was a little shelf. Resting on the shelf and hidden in the shadows sat a dust-covered metal box—it was about the size of Aaron’s lunch box.

  I tried to pick it up with one hand, but the box was surprisingly heavy. So, unsteadily balancing on my sore knees, I reached with both hands and grabbed the box.

  I lost my balance.

  With a crash, I hit the plaster and my legs broke through the ceiling of the room below. I was stuck waist deep in Tilton House.

  THE ATTIC FILLED WITH DUST. Light shone up from the room below. The heavy box was still in my hands.

  I listened for Mom’s voice or the sound of her footsteps. Nothing. I looked down. Splintered wood and plaster jabbed my waist, keeping me from falling. It hurt. Very carefully, I set the box down on the nearest beam and tried to pull myself up and out. The plaster and wood cut deeper into me. I tried to twist around, but I was lodged tightly.

  If I called Mom for help, she’d yell at me. And she’d call Dad for sure. But even if I could manage to get out on my own, there was no way I could hide that hole.

  “Mom?” I called softly into the cobwebs and dust of the attic. No response. “Mom!” I shouted. Still nothing. I yelled at the top of my lungs. I yelled for minutes on end. “Mom! Help!” No one came.

  Maybe no one would ever come. Maybe I’d be stuck here until the batteries ran out on my headlamp. Maybe spiders were crawling over my head right now, getting ready to sink their fangs into me. I ran my hands through my hair in a panic.

  The house held me tight. And not in a comforting way. “You may not always like me,” the house seemed to be saying, “but you’re not going anywhere and neither am I.”

  Finally, after what felt like half an hour, I heard a noise below that sounded like the back door slamming.

  “Josh?” came the distant sound of Mom’s voice.

  “I’m up here!” I yelled.

  The voice came closer. “I was in the backyard. Did you call me?”

  “Yes!”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “No.”

  I heard the sound of hurrying footsteps on the stairs, then Mom’s voice directly below me. “Oh my Lord. Are you hurt?”

  “I’m stuck.”

  Mom called Dad, who came home in spite of the measles quarantine. After an hour of careful cutting with a saw, I fell into Dad’s arms. Red scrapes circled my waist. I tried to play them off as no big deal, but they really hurt. Mom yelled at me for disobeying her order to stay out of the attic, and Dad yelled at me for making the hole in the ceiling and forcing him to come home from work in the middle of the day. Then Mom hugged me for a while and sprayed a bunch of Bactine on my scrapes, which isn’t supposed to hurt but always stings like crazy anyway. Dad said we would talk later about consequences, but he had to return to work before he got in trouble with Mr. Stevens.

  I had grabbed the box before Dad pulled me out. Dad barely looked at it, probably because he was in such a hurry to get back to work.

  Dad, Grandpa, and Aaron returned home the next day. When they pulled up in front of Tilton House, I went outside for the first time since the measles began.

  After Dad helped him out of the car, Grandpa stared at the house and whistled. “You done good, son.” I turned. Dad had nearly finished painting during my quarantine. Now the house had bright white trim and shutters against rich gray-blue walls. It looked all dressed up and ready to meet the mayor.

  Dad smiled proudly. I smiled, too. The house still looked crazy on the inside, but I was kind of proud of how it looked on the outside.

  Dad and Grandpa set about patching the hole in the ceiling with boards, sheetrock, and plaster. I had to help and also had to pay for part of the supplies out of my allowance. I didn’t mind. I figured I owed the house that much.

  “Promise me you won’t go into the attic anymore,” Mom said.

  “I don’t want you making any more holes,” said Dad. “I got enough work around here as it is.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Mom. “When are you going to paint the inside of this place?”

  “I haven’t photographed the walls yet,” replied Dad as he walked away, “but don’t worry. It’s on my to-do list.”

  Aaron and I examined the metal box on my first break from helping patch the ceiling. The box was olive green and heavy and, unlike most boxes, didn’t open at the top. Instead, there were two drawers under a keyhole. The metalwork around the keyhole was shaped like a capital T.

  I pulled the bottom drawer, but it wouldn’t open. Then I p
ulled the top one and it slid out smoothly. Inside lay a paper envelope and a tiny key. The handle of the key was shaped like the T around the keyhole, but the key was far too small to fit in the lock.

  I tried anyway. It didn’t work.

  “Maybe you have to turn the key sideways,” said Aaron.

  I tried that. Then I tried putting the key in backward. Nothing worked. I picked up the envelope from the drawer and read the spidery writing on it out loud:

  “What’s ‘grow powder’?” asked Aaron.

  As soon as Aaron said that, I understood. “It’s to make the key grow!” I said. “You put grow powder on the key and it will grow until it fits the lock.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why else would the key and the envelope be together?”

  “That is so cool,” said Aaron. “We could sprinkle some on a Hot Wheels car. Then we could have our own cars.” We both stared at the envelope in silence for a moment and thought about the possibilities of the grow powder. “Why does it say it has ‘deadly consequences’?”

  “Well, what if it makes the key grow to five times its normal size?” I said. “Or ten times? Or what if you accidentally spilled some on a dog and it grew to the size of a horse?”

  Aaron’s face went white. He hated dogs.

  “That’s why we can’t open it now,” I said, slipping the tiny envelope back into the metal drawer. “We need to wait until we ’re way out in the middle of nowhere, where nothing bad like that could happen. Someplace safe.”