Philip and the Monsters (9781619500464)

by Paulits, John

  “Think back over everything we did after school and find something in the movie to match it.”

  Emery thought back. “I can’t remember anything special. We talked about monsters, and the movie has monsters in it, but so what?”

  “We talked about monsters? Only talked? You watch and you’ll see so what.”

  Philip hit the play button on the DVD player, and the movie began. The title read:

  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

  The two boys watched as a short, monster-filled cartoon run behind the movie’s credits.

  “It’s not scary yet,” said Emery. “I like cartoons.”

  Then the movie started.

  “Okay, now maybe it’s a little scary,” said Emery. “But today wasn’t foggy or . . .”

  “Shh. Watch.”

  A dark, foggy London night long ago. The blinds on a hotel window open, and a frightened man peers nervously out. He hurries to the telephone to see whether his phone call to America has been completed. It hasn’t and he tells the operator to hurry. Two silly guys, one tall, Chick Young, and the other short and chubby, Wilbur Gray, run the baggage room of a train station somewhere in America. After Wilbur pulls out the bottom suitcase from a high pile and knocks everything else off the cart, their phone rings. It’s a long-distance call from the frightened man in the London hotel room.

  “Hello. Do you have two crates addressed to the MacDougal House of Horrors?”

  “What’s the number on the checks?” asks chubby Wilbur.

  “Never mind that. Tonight the moon will be full here. I haven’t much time. Now listen closely. I’m flying out of here at dawn. Under no circumstances are you to deliver those crates until I arrive. Understand? Under . . .”

  The man stops talking and begins to growl. We see his face change, and he becomes a werewolf!

  Wilbur tells the man to stop gargling into the phone because he can’t understand him. Then Wilbur tells him to get his dog away from the phone, but the werewolf goes wild and disappears.

  Chick and Wilbur deliver the two crates to MacDougal’s House of Horrors and out of the two crates come Dracula and the Frankenstein monster. While Chick is outside, Dracula hypnotizes Wilbur, but Wilbur awakens and sees the two monsters sneak off. He and Chick get arrested and put in jail for stealing whatever was in the now empty crates. No one believes Wilbur when he tells the truth about what he saw.

  Finally out of jail, they’re back in their hotel room when the Wolfman from London, back again in human form, walks down their hallway looking at the numbers on the hotel doors. He knocks on theirs.

  Wilbur opens the door.

  The Wolfman says, “You’re Wilbur Gray.”

  Wilbur says,“Yes, sir.”

  “Then you must be Chick Young.”

  “So what?” says Chick.

  “I’m Lawrence Talbot. I’ve been looking all over town for you.”

  Philip stopped the movie, and the two boys turned and faced one another.

  “Did he say Talbot?” Emery whispered.

  “Yes! Talbot! The same name, and we saw them get a long box delivered.”

  “Put the lights on,” said Emery. “Put ’em on!”

  Philip leaned over and turned on the table lamp next to the sofa where they sat.

  “Lawrence Talbot,” Emery whispered.

  “It’s the same name,” Philip repeated.

  “You don’t think . . . you don’t think . . . in the box . . .”

  “A monster? A Frankenstein monster? No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. A whole big monster couldn’t fit in such a little box.”

  “A baby Frankenstein! It could be a baby Frankenstein! A baby Frankenstein would fit.”

  The boys eyes met again and Emery said, “A bat upstairs; a baby Frankenstein in a box; and Lawrence Talbot. A vampire, a monster and a werewolf living almost right next door to us.”

  “I have a calendar in the kitchen,” said Philip, jumping up from the sofa. “Let’s go check it.”

  “Why? You want to see how many days we have left to live?”

  “No, we have to check the date of the next full moon.”

  Shoulder-to-shoulder both boys went into the kitchen where a big calendar with a picture of a Christmas tree hung next to the refrigerator. Philip ran his finger over it and said, “Today is Tuesday. The full moon is this Friday.”

  “Oh,” moaned Emery. “We might not last till this Friday. What are we going to do?”

  “You have to get your mom to invite me to sleep over on Friday.”

  “Why?”

  “We have to watch that house. You can see it from your bedroom, right?

  “Some of it.”

  The phone rang.

  “Ahhh!” Both boys jumped.

  Philip’s mother’s voice came from upstairs. “It’s your mother, Emery. You have to go now.”

  Emery gathered up his coat and school bag. “When we watch the house, what’ll we look for?”

  “Those three—things—you just said before, but don’t say them again. Remember,” whispered Philip as his father joined them at the front door. “Sleepover, tell your mother.”

  “You want to walk me home?”

  Philip shook his head rapidly.

  “I’ll walk you,” said Philip’s father.

  “See you,” said Emery, greatly relieved.

  Philip waved goodbye. He ran to the dining room window and watched until he saw his father coming safely back up the pathway to their front door. You never knew what might happen with neighbors like they had.

  Chapter Four

  It began snowing Thursday afternoon. The children in Philip’s classroom oohed and aahed their approval of the change in the weather right in the middle of Mr. Ware’s math lesson. The noises didn’t make him happy, but he understood, so he switched over to a lesson on the formation of snow and left common denominators for another time.

  Philip played with Emery in the falling snow after school and came home cold, wet, and happy. He changed into dry clothing and lay down on his bed to rest a minute and think.

  Philip had spent much of today and the day before in deep discussions with Emery over whether a genuine monster could really exist. At first they concluded no; monsters only lived in fairy tales. But after talking it over further, they concluded yes. Why would people write about monsters and make so many movies about something make-believe? They realized there could be lots of weird and different things going on in faraway places they didn’t know anything about. Even if monsters did exist in the world, though, they concluded they were safe because a monster could never show up right in their own neighborhood. Impossible! After more discussion they concluded they weren’t safe at all because if monsters existed, every one of them had to be somewhere, so why not their neighborhood as well as any other? Philip pointed out the Talbot name on the mailbox and the howling of what might or might not have been Mrs. Wenner’s dog. Emery threw in the fluttering of the bat in the upstairs window of the Moster/Talbot house and the air holes in the baby Frankenstein box. When time for discussing things ran out, the boys absolutely positively concluded that maybe these monsters might exist, and they could even be right in their own neighborhood, as impossible as it seemed. Yes, of that much they were certain.

  Philip father’s called from downstairs so Philip went to see what he wanted.

  “What are you doing home so soon?” Philip asked. “It’s only five o’clock.”

  “I decided to leave the office before the snow got too bad to drive in. It’s supposed to stop before midnight. Probably not enough to cancel school, I’m afraid.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday anyway,” said Philip. “Last day. And we have gym.”

  “I bought a couple new movies—new old movies. This one’s for you. Here. You and Emery liked the Frankenstein and werewolf movie so much, I’m sure you’ll like this one.”

  Philip reluctantly took the plastic bag his father handed him and pulled out a DVD with a pictur
e of a werewolf under the title of the movie.

  The Wolfman

  The cover showed the face and shoulders of a hairy-headed, big-nosed werewolf with his lower teeth jutting out of his partly opened mouth. Over the werewolf’s right shoulder a smaller picture showed him holding onto a woman falling over backwards in his arms. Someone he planned to snack on later, Philip guessed. Fog covered the ground behind the werewolf’s head and a black sky loomed overhead. As Philip inspected the pictures on the box, he realized this werewolf looked like the werewolf in the first movie. He turned the DVD case over and recognized the name. Lon Chaney, Jr. The same name as in the first movie.

  After dinner Philip’s mom and dad took their movie upstairs to watch. Philip looked at The Wolfman DVD case on the coffee table in the living room and decided he’d wait until tomorrow and watch it with Emery. The phone rang.

  Philip ran to the kitchen and grabbed the receiver. “Hello.”

  “Philip!”

  “I got it, Mom. It’s Emery.” Philip waited for his mother to hang up. “What do you want, Emery?”

  “Philip, he’s here. He’s here!”

  “Who’s here? Where are you?

  “Larry Talbot. He’s here! Right in my house.”

  “Larry Talbot. The Wolfman? What are you talking about? You mean a movie?”

  “No, no, no. No movie. He’s here. He’s really here. He’s the guy who moved into in the haunted house! My mother knows him, and he’s right downstairs, and his last name’s Talbot. Larry Talbot. I gotta go. Pray for me.” The phone went dead.

  Pray for him! Emery had never said anything like that before. Philip spent an uneasy night worrying about his friend, and felt greatly relieved to see Emery waiting on the sidewalk the next morning making designs in the snow with the toe of his snow boot. He ran up to him.

  “What were you talking about? Larry Talbot visited your house?”

  As they walked toward school, Emery explained. “My mother went to high school or something with him. He’s even got a wife and a kid. A little kid. He knew where my mother lived and stopped in.”

  “Did his whole family come?”

  “No. Only him. Thank goodness he only stayed a few minutes, but when my mother introduced him and said where he lived and told me his name, I almost fainted. I had to shake his hand, and his hand was freezing! He’s tall and skinny, and he dressed just like his mailbox. White shirt and black pants. I never want to see him again. He is so scary looking, and he didn’t smile even once! He looks like one of those guys who buries people and dresses in black all time. And he’s got a hairy face, too.”

  “You mean a beard?”

  “It’s sort of a beard on his chin, but the rest of his face is just fuzzy hairy like he didn’t really start shaving yet.”

  “So what did he do when he visited?”

  “He stayed a little while and talked to my mother and father.”

  “Did you listen?”

  “No, I ran upstairs to call you right away, and I stayed upstairs.”

  “So,” Philip said slowly, “do you think he’s a werewolf like we saw in the movie?”

  “How do I know? You think he’s going to say, ‘Hi, I’m a werewolf. May I bite your face off?’”

  “No, I guess he wouldn’t say that.”

  “Now he knows where I live. I watched from the top of the stairs, and before he left, guess what he did?”

  “What?”

  “He went and looked out the window.”

  Philip stared at Emery in confusion. “What was out the window?”

  “The moon.”

  Philip gasped.

  The idea that Larry Talbot thought it important to take a look at the moon, which they both knew would be full that night, silenced both boys.

  “You think he had to get home, you know, before . . . ?” said Philip softly.

  “Before he changed?”

  Philip nodded.

  Emery didn’t answer. He didn’t have to, since both boys had reached an unspoken agreement. After a moment he said, “I have to go to Mrs. Moriarty’s tonight to be baby sat, but we’re lucky. Mrs. Moriarty asked if I wanted company, and I said you so she’s going to call your mom today and ask if you can eat dinner over. My mom’s going to call your mom and see if you can sleep over my house.”

  “Good. Yesterday, my father brought home a movie for us to watch. He said he thought we’d like it. Ha!”

  “What movie?”

  “The Wolfman.”

  “The Wolfman! No way!”

  “Yes way, and it’s got the same guy in it, the Larry Talbot guy.”

  “The guy from the haunted house is a movie star?” Emery cried, his eyes popping open.

  “No, stupid. The guy who’s Larry Talbot in the first movie. Same face. Same guy.”

  “Oooohhhh.” The boys stopped talking and looked to their right. The Talbot house sat in the morning sunlight, peaceful and pretty. The snowfall had turned the neighborhood into a Christmas card scene, and this scariest of houses fit right in.

  “Looks okay now, doesn’t it?” said Emery. “You think we’ll see anything tonight when the moon’s full?”

  “You sound like you think we will.”

  “I can’t help it. This house. Larry Talbot. Everything. It’s starting to . . .” Emery put his hands in front of him and interlaced his fingers.

  “Yeah, I know.” He had no desire to tease Emery about being scared.

  “You think we’ll see anything?” Emery repeated.

  “This is the full moon night,” said Philip, as if that answered the question.

  “I know,” Emery said in a whisper, as if that concluded the discussion.

  They turned their backs on the haunted house and, with only an occasional stop to toss a snowball at a tree, they walked silently the rest of the way to school.

  Chapter Five

  “So how are you boys going to entertain yourselves tonight?” Mrs. Moriarty asked. Mrs. Moriarty was Philip’s favorite grownup neighbor, and the only grownup he knew who liked candy as much as he did. She always had dishes full of candy right out where you could get at them—she was especially fond of M & Ms—and she never complained if you ate a lot or emptied a dish. She simply filled it up again. She was older than most of his other neighbors, and whenever his or Emery’s parents went out, he and Emery always asked for Mrs. Moriarty to do the babysitting.

  “We have a movie to watch,” said Emery. “Philip’s father bought it for him.”

  “What is it? Would I like it?”

  “The Wolfman,” said Philip. “It’s about a werewolf.”

  “A werewolf! Brrrr! I think I’ll pass. Why did your father give you such a scary movie, Philip?”

  Philip looked at Emery. “Oh . . . we . . . we need to do something for school. Emery’s doing a report on scary things.”

  “Yeah. Remember I interviewed you?”

  “Oh, yes. I do. What kind of report are you doing, Philip?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure yet.”

  “They certainly give out different kinds of assignments from when I went to school. I remember once I had to find out the capitals of all the countries in South America. Oh, well. Dinner in fifteen minutes.” Mrs. Moriarty disappeared into the kitchen.

  Philip motioned Emery to a window in the living room and pulled the curtain aside. The street lamp shone on the now trampled snow. The cars had churned up all the snow in the street, and people had shoveled their sidewalks. Only on people’s lawns where no one had walked yet did the snow still appear new-looking.

  “I don’t see the moon,” said Philip.

  “Not until seven-fifteen,” said Emery.

  “So late? You sure?”

  “The newspaper said so. I checked.”

  “Seven-fifteen,” Philip repeated. “I guess we’re safe until then.”

  “Did you figure out how we’re going to investigate?”

  “I think so. How about this? We say we need a schoolbook from my
house. I purposely left my math book on the dining room table. We run and get it, and after we have it, we go investigate as long as we can and get back before Mrs. M. gets suspicious.”

  “Good plan. What time should we . . . ?”

  “Nine. When we’re sure the full moon is up.”

  “Can’t we go earlier? Before he . . . changes?”

  “If we go earlier, he won’t be a werewolf, and we won’t know whether he’s a werewolf or not, but if we go when he’s supposed to be a werewolf and he’s not a werewolf, then we proved he’s not a werewolf. Don’t you see?”

  Emery repeated Philip’s sentence slowly in his head. “I think so,” he agreed doubtfully. “But you left out—suppose we go, and he is a werewolf?”

  “Dinnertime,” came Mrs. Moriarty’s voice from the kitchen.

  “That’s why we gotta watch the movie first. It’ll probably tell us things we need to know, like how to get protection against a werewolf.”

  “Yeah, that might be a good thing to know about.”

  “Come on, boys,” called Mrs. Moriarty again. This time, the boys walked off toward the kitchen.

  ****

  “This movie’s boring,” Emery complained. “I thought it would be scary, but it’s nothing but a family reunion.” He and Philip sat in Mrs. Moriarty’s den, lit only by the flickering glow from the television. Mrs. Moriarty watched her own movie in the living room. “It’s got a love story, too.” Emery frowned. “Yuk! I don’t think the girl would like Larry Talbot much if she knew he was busy turning into a werewolf instead of taking her dancing.”

  “How’s she supposed to know that?” Philip responded irritably. “Anyway, he’s not a werewolf yet. He’s only regular so far. The movie must show how he got to be one. Be quiet and pay attention, will you?”

  They watched a while longer, but Emery continued to complain.

  “I wish something interesting would happen. He’s didn’t turn to a Wolfman once yet.”