by Philip Kerr
One day when this happened, Billy was with Mr. Rapscallion, in Monsters and Mad Scientists. This room was full of books like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wagner the Werewolf. Billy liked these books, especially Dr. Jekyll. The illustrated version seemed really fantastic. He also liked this room because there was a large table, and lying on it, underneath a sheet, was the figure of an enormous man, or, to be more accurate, a monster; and beside the monster stood a mad scientist in a white smock. The monster and the scientist looked all too real, as if at any moment both of them might come to life. And, of course, sometimes, they did just that.
“Are you up there, Mr. Rapscallion?” called Mr. Crane, coming halfway up the curved wooden stairs. “It’s me. Your business partner. Hugh Crane.”
“Yes, I’m here,” Mr. Rapscallion shouted.
“Could you come down here, please?” shouted Crane. “I want to speak to you.”
“I’m a little busy right now,” Mr. Rapscallion shouted back to the tycoon. “Come along to Monsters and Mad Scientists.”
“Oh, very well,” Crane shouted crossly.
Mr. Rapscallion could hardly contain his mischievous excitement at what was about to happen. He grinned at Billy. “Wait until he gets a load of what’s in this room,” he said, chuckling happily.
Crane peered cautiously around the door, the lenses in his blue-tinted glasses shining like two tiny aquariums that were home to the two snakes that were his calculating eyes. Crane had suffered several unpleasant surprises before in the Haunted House of Books and he was being careful not to encounter another. If there was one thing Crane hated more than books, it was surprises. Especially the kind of surprises that were to be found at the Haunted House of Books.
“Ah, Mr. Rapscallion, there you are.” He smiled a wooden sort of smile. “Is this room safe? For me to come in?”
“Safe? Yes, it’s safe,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Come ahead, sir. Come ahead. Only please, no large numbers. You know what I’m like with large numbers.”
Crane stepped into Monsters and Mad Scientists and looked around nervously. “So here you are,” he said, trying to sound pleasant.
“Yes, here I am.” Mr. Rapscallion pointed at Billy. “Mr. Crane, this is my young friend, Billy Shivers.”
Crane grunted. If there was one thing he disliked more than books and surprises, it was boys. Girls were bad enough, but boys did things he didn’t like at all. They ran around in the street and played with balls, and shouted at each other, and didn’t stand up straight; they laughed at stupid jokes and they kept their hands in their pockets, and they ate potato chips in shops, and they didn’t blow their noses, and they mumbled when they were spoken to. But above all Crane hated boys because they disliked washing their hair. No boy likes washing his hair any more than he likes it being washed by his mother, and any boy worth his salt will usually find ways to avoid having his hair washed more than once a month. If at all. As a man who had made millions of dollars selling shampoo, Crane regarded any boy as nothing less than an alien species of life because boys dislike washing their hair.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Crane?” asked Mr. Rapscallion. “How about a book? This book, for instance. The Lair of the White Worm, by Bram Stoker. You might enjoy that.”
“I’m not interested in worms,” said Crane. “Of any color. Unless they’re bookworms, of course. The quicker all these silly books are consumed by worms the better, in my opinion. It’s a hard world we live in, Mr. Rapscallion. And books have no place in it.”
Mr. Rapscallion nodded patiently. He’d heard all of this before.
“Besides,” added Crane, “you know what you can do for me, Mr. Rapscallion. You can accept my very generous offer for this shop.” He opened the envelope of cash and, bringing the wad of money up to Mr. Rapscallion’s nose, proceeded to riffle the ends of the banknotes like someone about to deal from a pack of playing cards. “Do you smell that, Mr. Rapscallion? Do you smell that? It’s hard cash, sir. Money. A generous cash offer considering the amount of money you already owe me.”
“And please don’t mention what that is,” said Mr. Rapscallion.
“An offer that’s more than enough for you to put an end to this madness and retire from business, sir. Frankly, sir, you are not cut out for business. Not cut out for it at all. Which is why this place is on its knees, sir.”
“As you say, it’s a very generous offer, Mr. Crane,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “But this place is my living. It’s my life. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t come here every day.”
“Me neither,” mumbled Billy.
“What’s that you say, boy?” demanded Crane. “Stop mumbling. I can’t tolerate a boy who mumbles.”
“I said, me neither,” said Billy.
“Me neither, what?”
“I mean I wouldn’t know what to do with myself either,” said Billy. “If I didn’t come here every day.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Crane said crossly. “You wouldn’t know because you have no common sense. Because you’re a dreamer, boy. All boys are silly dreamers. I can’t tolerate a dreamer. Give me a man who has common sense. And I’ll show you a man with a job, a mortgage, a car and a future. In short, I’ll show you a man I can own.”
“The answer is still no,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “No, no, no.”
“Then you’re a fool, sir,” said Crane. “You’re a fool. All the same, I won’t give up, sir. I won’t give up. I’ll be back. And one day you’ll take my offer, sir. I can guarantee it. You’ll have to accept my offer if only to repay the money you already owe me. You know it. And I know it. I always get what I want in business. Always. Not for nothing am I called Crane the Pain. One day this place will be mine, do you hear? Mine. MINE!”
Like any other tycoon, Hugh Crane was very fond of the sound of his voice. And listening to his own opinions had made him forget where he was. He started to walk around Monsters and Mad Scientists, oblivious to the possibility that a stray footstep might activate a hidden spring, or electronic sensor, and set something very monstrous in motion. And this is exactly what happened.
One moment everything was normal, and the next moment there was an enormous clap of thunder—frightening enough for anyone not expecting it. Then a bolt of lightning lit up the room and several electrical machines filled with a strange sparking blue light that seemed to transmit a deafening current into the body of the monster on the table. The monster’s enormous hand lifted, at which point the mad scientist lurched toward it and began to shout hysterically.
“It’s alive,” he raved. “It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive!!!”
Mr. Crane paled and took several steps back as the lights dimmed and the sheet covering the monster fell away onto the floor as it sat up on the table. As monsters went, this one was top-shelf; green, with a sort of crack in its square skull, and hooded eyes, the monster was only vaguely human. Frankly, this monster strongly resembled a thing. The monster growled unpleasantly, like a bad-tempered dog, and pointed straight at Hugh Crane.
“IT’S ALIVE!” screamed the scientist.
“Wow,” said Billy. “Awesome.”
Poor Mr. Crane had seen enough. He let out a howl that could have come whooping out of the monkey house in a zoo. The next second he turned and ran out of the room and down the curved staircase. Halfway down he slipped and descended the rest of the stairs on his behind, like someone sledding down a bumpy hill who has forgotten to bring a sled.
Mr. Rapscallion and Billy followed him out onto the gallery above the stairs just to see that he was all right.
At the bottom Hugh Crane picked himself up and, seeing Mr. Rapscallion laughing, shook his fist at him furiously. “I thought you said the room was safe, you madman,” he yelled, crossly.
“The room is safe,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “I didn’t say it wasn’t frightening.”
He carried on laughing and chuckling and chortling and giggling for at least fifteen minutes after Hugh Crane had r
aced out of the door of the Haunted House of Books.
Finally Mr. Rapscallion sat down on the stairs, and when he had finished laughing, he let out a breath and sighed.
“Crane’s right, though. One day this place probably will be his. I’ll have no alternative but to sell. I already owe him money. And I just don’t make enough money to keep the shop going, Billy. I have to pay the electricity bill, the telephone bill, the gas bill, insurance and taxes. I can’t even afford to employ someone to help out around here. A book clerk. Every time I see that bundle of cash in Crane’s hand and get the smell of money in my nostrils, I think that maybe he’s talking sense. That maybe I should sell.”
“No,” said Billy. “You can’t sell. I love this place.”
“It’s unfortunate that more people don’t seem to agree with you,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “But the figures don’t lie. There just aren’t enough people buying books to make this place break even. Let alone make a profit.”
“But what about kids? Kids would love this place.”
“Tell that to my daughter. Altaira hates this shop. Hates books. Not just books about ghosts and horror. I mean she hates all books. The only reading she does is when her dumb little friends text her with one of those messages that look like they were spelled by a moron from another planet.”
“There are lots of other kids,” said Billy. “Father Merrin said you started this place for kids. Where are they?”
“They used to come. But not anymore. Tastes change, I guess.”
“Maybe you have to try to get them back in here. Have you tried?”
“Have I tried? Have I tried? Only all the time, Billy.”
“What about Halloween? I saw your poster in the public library. It’s what persuaded me to come and check this place out. How did that go?”
“Halloween?” Mr. Rapscallion let out a sigh. “Last Halloween was the worst. That was nothing short of disastrous. Let me tell you what happened here last Halloween.”
“Halloween used to be our best time of year to sell books,” Mr. Rapscallion told Billy. “It was like the Christmas holidays for a toy shop. Or Valentine’s Day for a florist’s. And each year I’d make a special effort to devise a new section in the bookshop and a new surprise to go in it.
“I’ve always loved Egyptology. And although I’ve never been there, Egypt’s a country to which I would dearly love to go. This year I decided I was going to do the next best thing and open a room of books dedicated to the Curse of the Pharaohs. Egyptian mummies coming back to life, living burials, flesh-eating scarabs and that kind of thing.
“So, I had a burial chamber built with golden bookshelves, a large stone idol of the Egyptian god Anubis—he’s the one with the head of a jackal, the Egyptian god of death—and, on its end, an open sarcophagus with a life-size mummy standing inside. It looked pretty good, if I do say so myself. The mummy was properly ancient and sinister. As if it really was an ancient Egyptian priest who had been buried alive for, well…many years. A man who had been wrapped in filthy gray bandages that were as old as the pyramids themselves.
“Of course, the best part was when the mummy came back to life. All you had to do was touch and read aloud the inscription written on the forbidden casket, activating the sound sensor and the touch sensor. This was in hieroglyphs, of course, but there was an English translation underneath for those who don’t know ancient Egyptian. It read: DEATH. ETERNAL AND EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT FOR ANYONE WHO DARES TO OPEN THIS CASKET.
“The sensors would pass an electrical signal to the sarcophagus and, oh so silently, the mummy would start to reanimate. This would happen very slowly, too—the idea being that you might not even notice. That you might be too interested in the book you were reading to be paying attention to anything happening quietly behind you.
“First, the eyes of the mummy would open just a crack, like something that really had been sleeping for thousands of years. Then they would open just a little more and glitter with supernatural life. After a few more seconds, the bony, half-decayed hands, crossed over the mummy’s chest, would shift underneath the dusty old bandages that wrapped him, and then drop slowly to his sides. Finally the horrible head would straighten on the mummy’s shoulders and the thing would take a step out of the sarcophagus and then reach out and touch whatever was standing next to it. And, hopefully, give that person one heck of a fright.
“Believe me, Billy, when I tell you that it was impossible to see the poor creature and not think it stranger than Dracula, more fantastic than Frankenstein, more mysterious than the Invisible Man. Was it dead or alive? Was it human or inhuman? The first time I saw it working, I felt the awful creeping, crawling terror that stands your hair on end like sticks of raw spaghetti.”
“Oh wow,” said Billy. “It sounds awesome, Mr. Rapscallion. Really awesome. I love all that Egyptian stuff. Can we go and see the mummy right now?”
“That room is now locked.” Mr. Rapscallion sounded grave.
“Why? Did something terrible happen in there on Halloween?”
Mr. Rapscallion looked pained. “Let me tell the story,” he said. “I had put up several posters advertising our Halloween event in the Hitchcock Public Library, and in all the school libraries in and around the town. Several local authors had said they would come and sign copies of their books: Esteban Rex, the author of the Rigor Mortis books; Horace X. Horror, who wrote Imagined Terrors, of course; and the bestselling novelist Deacon Wordz, whose Elvis Weird books have been made into several successful and, it’s fair to say, extremely scary movies. Victor Gespensterbruch, one of Hitchcock’s leading ghost hunters, even agreed to give a short talk on the types of ghosts that there are.
“Everything had been prepared. There was bread and cheese. To drink there was Bull’s Blood, which is a variety of Hungarian red wine, for the grown-ups. And for the kids there were Dracula Cocktails—just raspberry juice, but served in silver goblets to make it look more like something with lots of hemoglobin that a vampire would actually drink.
“On the night itself there were plenty of children. More than I’ve ever seen in here. They were mostly about twelve or thirteen years old. And many of them came from King Herod the Great Middle School, in Northwest Hitchcock.”
“I know that school,” said Billy. “It’s a really tough school. And there are some really tough kids who go there.”
“Don’t I know it,” Mr. Rapscallion said bitterly. “At first everything went well. The authors read and signed their books for customers. And Victor Gespensterbruch gave a fascinating talk. Everyone’s heard of a poltergeist—a mischievous ghost. Well, he told us all about the unterdembettgeist—which is a recently discovered under-the-bed variety of ghost. We sold some books. Quite a few, actually. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Some of the kids—especially the boys—were a little boisterous, but you expect that. Boys will be boys. Mostly they were showing off to the girls. The way boys do, right?”
Billy nodded, although he was certain that he had never in his life showed off to anyone, let alone a girl. Why would someone do that?
“I got an idea that things might be going wrong just before eleven o’clock,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Really, most of the children should have been at home by then. But their parents didn’t seem to care. Then Deacon Wordz, the author, came and told me that there was trouble with the Curse of the Pharaohs. That something dreadful had happened. So I went along there and…” He shook his head. “It was truly horrifying.”
“What was it?” Billy gasped. “Don’t tell me that one of those boys had actually died of fright?”
Mr. Rapscallion could hardly speak, he was so upset.
“Would you care to see for yourself?” he asked Billy somberly.
“Why, yes, I would,” answered Billy. “At least, I think so.”
With a grave look, Mr. Rapscallion produced a key and led Billy to one of the upper floors and then along a low, dark corridor to the Curse of the Pharaohs room.
The heavy
wooden door was painted gold and looked exactly like the door in an old Egyptian tomb. There were hieroglyphic symbols painted on it and the handle was shaped like an ankh, which is a sort of hieroglyph like a cross with a loop on the top: this symbol means “life.”
Billy felt nervous as Mr. Rapscallion unlocked the door and turned the strange handle. He wondered what really terrible thing he was going to see in there. A dead body, perhaps? A large bloodstain on the floor? A severed head?
“I haven’t been in here since the night it happened,” explained Mr. Rapscallion. “I haven’t felt strong enough to remind myself of the horror.”
The door opened with a loud creak, as if it might actually have been closed for several thousand years. Mr. Rapscallion went in first, reached for the electric light switch and turned it on.
Gathering his courage, Billy followed.
He wasn’t at all sure what he was going to see. Something that Mr. Rapscallion had described as horrifying could very probably have included just about anything. But certainly Billy had not expected to see anything like what he saw now.
It was horrifying, in a way. And, now that he thought about it, the sight that met his eyes was, perhaps, the most awful thing he had seen in the Haunted House of Books.
The mummy was standing in the sarcophagus. It still looked like a long-dead priest wrapped in bandages. Except for the fact that someone—presumably one of the wicked boys from King Herod the Great Middle School, in Northwest Hitchcock—had spray-painted the bandages completely pink, from head to toe. Which, of course, completely ruined the effect. After all, there is nothing terrifying about a mummy that is as pink as the icing on a birthday cake.
A pink mummy was bad enough. But there was worse. Much worse. A large pair of pink furry rabbit’s ears had been stuck on the mummy’s head and a big juicy red carrot had been placed in its moldering, wrapped hand so that the poor old thing now resembled a weird soft cuddly toy that had been abandoned by some careless child, instead of an Egyptian priest cursed for all eternity.