by Philip Kerr
Books from the subterranean library may not be purchased as a qualification for this contest. Many of those books are unsuitable for children and probably quite a few adults. Besides, they’re antiquarian books and I’d rather you didn’t go in there.
12. Anything else you might mistakenly think we haven’t thought of is contained in the very small print underneath. That’s right. This is just the small print. Our lawyers can get much smaller than this, believe me.
The Very Small Print: All rights reserved, whatever the heck that means. We wouldn’t have to print this kind of almost invisible and meaningless rubbish if people weren’t such greedy morons, always trying to make a quick buck from other people who are just trying to scrape out an honest living. Or if there weren’t so many greedy, grasping lawyers. Which reminds me, if you’re a lawyer and you try to sue me or persuade other people to sue me, I shall take great pleasure in pointing out that everything is covered in the small print, or the very small print. So there. Now you know what it feels like. Get yourself a better pair of glasses and a decent job. I’ve got more respect for vampires than I do for lawyers: vampires have to suck blood to stay alive; lawyers do it because they like it. The organizer’s decision is final. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went she was too dumb to take a book with her. But I bet she took an iPong or an iDork or an iDumb or an iThick or an iMoron or whatever they call one of those portable devices that are an excuse not to use your brain on a plane or a bus. Get a life, you dork. Haven’t you figured it out yet? This is why bookshops are closing all over the world. Because people are too stupid to read books. In case you’re interested, that’s why we’re running this contest. To try to get people through the door. Because if you mugs stop buying books there won’t be any bookshops. And this town will look as ignorant as the others in this state. Use it or lose it. That’s what I say.
Billy read it all carefully—even the very small print—and then nodded with approval.
But even before he’d finished reading, the sign in the window had attracted a large crowd of local people who started to discuss the contest with excitement.
“It looks like it’s working already,” Billy told Mr. Rapscallion.
“Good, because I told Mr. Johnson Hildebrand from the local newspaper all about it and he agreed to come over here with a photographer and to interview me. Aha.” Mr. Rapscallion pointed at two men walking across the street toward the shop. One of them was carrying several pounds of cameras around his neck. The other had a pencil behind his ear and a notebook in his hand.
“This might be them now,” said Mr. Rapscallion.
They were both fat and smelled strongly of beer.
“In fact, I’m sure of it.”
“Hildebrand,” said the man with the notebook. “From the Hitchcock Hard News? And this is Bill Snapz, our photographer.”
“Hey,” said Snapz. “How’re you doing?”
“And you must be Mr. Rapscallion,” said Mr. Hildebrand.
“How did you know?” asked Mr. Rapscallion.
“I’m a journalist,” said Mr. Hildebrand. “It’s my job to know things and find out stuff that sometimes people would prefer to remain hush-hush and covered up. Besides, there’s a tag on your shirt with your name on it.”
Mr. Rapscallion took Mr. Hildebrand into the shop to answer some questions for an article on the contest in the newspaper. Meanwhile, the photographer stayed outside taking pictures of the growing crowd. And Billy stayed to listen to what local people were saying about the contest.
“The scariest story in the world?” A tall man shook his head. “Ain’t no such thing. It’s just an obvious gimmick. To get people through the door.”
“Once upon a time, I met my wife,” said the man standing next to him. “That’s about the scariest story I know.”
Both men seemed to think that was pretty funny.
“I think it’s a fantastic idea,” said another man. “I must say my eldest son, Grub, could do with a good fright. He’s too cocky by far. You ask me, a scary story’s just what he needs to wipe the smug smile off that kid’s ugly face.”
“It’s the same with my daughter, Loopy,” said a woman. “It might be easier to get her home on time if she was a bit more frightened of the dark. I think it’s a great idea, too.”
“Nuts,” said someone else. “The guy’s crazy. Nothing scares kids these days. I caught my five-year-old watching a horror movie. And he was laughing. Laughing. I saw the same film when I was eighteen and I had nightmares about it for weeks afterward.”
“It’s just an easy way to throw away a thousand dollars.”
“You’re missing the point, mister,” said a clever little girl called Gnomi, who was about nine or ten years old. “Do you really not get it? This might be an easy way to pick up a thousand bucks.”
“She’s right,” said another kid. “What couldn’t I do with a thousand bucks?”
“Come to think of it,” said a policeman who had stopped to see what all the fuss was about, “there ain’t much that scares my boy, Wham, either. And our family could sure use a thousand dollars. We could buy a wide-screen TV. Or use the money to take a vacation.”
People were already starting to go inside the shop. And immediately several bought the cheapest book they could find—a very thin paperback by the Canadian horror writer F. Chankly Bore entitled Newfoundland Nocturnal—so that they could enter themselves or their child in the contest without any further delay.
And pretty soon the shoebox beside the cash register had several dozen names inside it.
The very next day, the front page of the Hitchcock Hard News carried a picture of the first child who would get to hear the scariest story ever written, and have a chance to win the thousand-dollar prize.
His name was Wilson Dirtbag and he was fifteen years old.
The picture in the newspaper showed a boy standing in front of the Haunted House of Books. He had short straw-colored hair and a pointed, nasty little pixie nose that looked like someone had been at it with a pencil sharpener. But what was really noticeable about Wilson Dirtbag’s face was the number of spots on it. There were so many angry-looking zits on his face it looked like some classroom comedian had dotted them on the photograph with a red pen.
Wilson Dirtbag was smiling in the picture but it was not a pleasant smile. For one thing, he was the kind of boy who only smiled when something nasty happened—like someone slipping on a banana peel, or falling down a flight of stairs—and so he was out of practice doing it just to seem agreeable, even if it was for the front page of the local newspaper. Also, he hadn’t cleaned his teeth in a long time, and as a result, these were a milky coffee color, with bits of food stuck between them.
“Like, I’m not scared of anything, you know?” he had told Mr. Hildebrand, the reporter. “I watch horror movies all the time when I’m at home but none of them frighten me in the least. You know? Not only that, but I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that junk, so the chances of some stupid story in an old book scaring me are, like, zero. Those historical kids in that old workhouse, in London? They must have been pretty dumb, if you ask me. ’Sides, kids then would have been scared by pretty much anything we take for granted, you know? Television. Telephones. Chances are they’d have run away if they’d seen an automobile.”
The boy’s mother, Fedora Dirtbag, was pictured in front of her trailer home in South Hitchcock with a cigarette in her lipsticked mouth and curlers in her bottle-blond hair.
“We’ve raised our son not to be scared of anything or anyone,” she had informed the newspaper reporter. “Least of all his teachers, or the police. When he was nine, a judge tried to scare him with some talk of prison but Wilson just laughed in his face. In my opinion? That thousand bucks is as good as ours already.”
“If you win the contest, what will you spend the money on?” Mr. Hildebrand had asked Wilson and his mother.
“Ther
e are some unpaid fines I suppose I’d better clear,” the boy had explained. “If there’s any dough left after that, I’ll probably get myself a decent air pistol. A Delinkwen one seventy-seven, or a Hoolihan magnum with a six-inch barrel.”
Elizabeth Wollstonecraft-Godwin shook her head and handed Mr. Rapscallion the newspaper.
“That is the most ghastly, horrible boy I think I have ever seen,” she said. “A rabid chimpanzee would have more appeal.”
“It’s even worse than that,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “This juvenile horror was most probably the ringleader of the so-called children who painted my mummy pink in the Curse of the Pharaohs room last Halloween. At least that’s what the police seemed to think.”
“It looks like you’re going to get your revenge,” said Billy. “On him, at least. When you read him the story.”
“That would be more than I could hope for,” admitted Mr. Rapscallion. He clenched his fists and his teeth and his toes at the same time. “I’d love to scare this little swine out of his spotty little skin,” he said.
The story in the Hitchcock Hard News had two immediate effects.
The first effect was that it brought hundreds more children and/or their parents into the store to buy a book so that they could enter the contest. (This ended up having the effect that F. Chankly Bore’s book became a bestseller.)
The second effect was that it brought several more local newspapers and television crews into the Haunted House of Books to interview Mr. Rapscallion. This in turn drew the attention of the whole country to what was happening in Hitchcock. And it wasn’t long before important and clever people were going on national television to talk about the scary story contest.
A professor of child psychology, Loren Gytis, went on The Johnny Gross Show to say that what Mr. Rapscallion was planning to do was criminally irresponsible and that he should be arrested before he could read the story and “damage young, impressionable minds.” Unfortunately for Professor Gytis, she herself was arrested after driving her Maserati car past an elementary school in Burpbank, California, at ninety miles per hour and crashing it into the back of a school bus. Fortunately, there were no children injured. But the accident left the professor looking like someone who was herself criminally irresponsible. Which was good for Mr. Rapscallion.
The very next day a top scientist, Doctor Werner Voercrime, who worked for the U.S. Army Research Institute of Fantastic New Weapons, suggested that if the scary story did prove to be lethal, as it had done in 1820, it should be treated like any dangerous virus and contained in a special vault at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, until such time as a possible military use for a scary story presented itself. When it was revealed by a leading Washington newspaper that the USARIFNW had been secretly and illegally developing a scary story of its own against the direct orders of the U.N. and the U.S. president, the research institute was closed and Dr. Voercrime was sacked.
Then an entirely hairless man living in London called Colin Careless claimed to a newspaper that he was descended from one of the boys from the workhouse at All Hallows Barking by the Tower who had heard the story in 1820, and subsequently tried to sue Miss Elizabeth Wollstonecraft-Godwin on the grounds that her ancestor had given his ancestor such a scare that he and his descendants had lost all of their hair in perpetuity—which is a legal word meaning forever and ever. An English judge dismissed Mr. Careless’s claim when it turned out that he had just been released from an insane asylum, where he had spent the last five years claiming he was actually the famously bald actor Yul Brynner.
By the time that Mr. Rapscallion drew the second child’s name from the box by the cash register, the story of the forthcoming contest had gripped the entire country and the English-speaking world, which is another way of saying that the French weren’t much interested in it.
The second name to come out of the shoebox was that of a rather beefy, muscular boy called Hugh Bicep, and very soon he and his even more muscular, beefy father and mother and his two brothers appeared on local television to talk about themselves. Hugh’s father, Arnold Bicep, wore a blue sweater, and his mother, Olympia Bicep, wore a red one. Hugh’s two brothers, Harry and Adolf, wore a yellow sweater and a green sweater. Hugh sat between his brothers and wore a black sweater that barely contained his bulk. The Bicep family was so muscular and colorful they looked like the five Olympic rings.
“I’ve always liked books,” said Hugh. “My room at home is full of them. I like the leather ones with the gold titles on their spines the best. They look really old and important. And when people see them on your shelves, they think you’re really clever. Of course, you couldn’t actually read any of them, I don’t think. I mean, they’re much too boring. Mostly I prefer to listen to music when I’m working out. But, you know, I did read a book once. It was about how to build a real washboard stomach. Which really worked, as these days my abs are like a brick wall.” And, so saying, Hugh Bicep tore off his shirt to reveal a torso that resembled the coils of a large rock python.
“What really scares you?” Mr. Hildebrand had then asked Hugh.
“What really scares me? That’s an interesting question. Not having enough to eat, I guess. I have to eat five times a day to build muscle, see? Washing my hair. Chicken that hasn’t been cooked properly. Switching on the television and finding nothing to watch. Losing my cell phone. Getting a wedgie. Running out of ketchup. Finding that the last candy in the box is a nutty one. Being bored. Lots and lots of homework. The thought that one day I might have to get a real job.”
“Can your son do it?” Mr. Hildebrand asked Hugh’s father. “Can Hugh pull it off and win the scary story contest?”
“Can he win?” Mr. Bicep laughed. “Of course he can win. My little boy is the most courageous person I’ve ever met. Let me tell you how courageous. Nothing scares my little boy. Nothing. You don’t believe me? Then listen to this, Mr. Hildebrand. A few years ago we all went on a trip to Brazil, and a crocodile tried to eat him. What do you think of that? It crawled alongside him in the dark, while Hugh was in bed. Anyway, I guess my little boy must have rolled over in his sleep and crushed the croc to death. But was he scared?” Mr. Bicep chuckled loudly. “Not on your life. He just shrugged it off. Then, only last year, Hugh found himself in the sea with a shark. True, the shark was dead after my little boy jumped into the water and landed right on top of the shark’s head and killed it, but that’s not the point. The point is that being in the water alongside a shark, even a dead one, didn’t scare him at all. In my opinion it’d be a pretty foolish ghost that tried to mess with my little boy. And as for a scary story. Well, this is the twenty-first century, not 1820. Besides, I can’t see Hugh’s bright enough to understand half the words they used back in 1820. You feel me?”
“Forget what I said about that other horrible boy,” said Miss Wollstonecraft-Godwin. “This boy is the most ghastly, horrible little boy I think I have ever seen.”
“He’s not so little,” observed Mercedes McBatty. “None of them are. The whole Bicep family looks like a truck with five tires.”
Billy laughed. It was true. The Bicep family did look like five tires on a very large truck.
“It’s even worse than that,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “This muscle-bound ignoramus was another one of the so-called children who painted my mummy pink in the Curse of the Pharaohs room last Halloween. At least that’s what the police seem to think.” He nodded. “This is good, right? This is all part of the plan, right? This is what we wanted, right?”
Billy frowned. “There is one thing you might not care for.”
“What’s that?” asked Mr. Rapscallion.
Billy took Mr. Rapscallion, Elizabeth and Mercedes outside. He led them to a large trash can a few yards down from the front door of the Haunted House of Books. The can was full of books, many of them still in the paper bags supplied by the shop.
“There,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”
Mr. Rapscallion shook his head. “Why would anyone throw
away a new book?” he said, fishing one out and looking at the title. It was a horror novel entitled Shadows Within Dark Landscapes by the writer Ken Biro.
“Simple,” explained Billy. “They’re buying books—the cheaper books—not to read, but in order to qualify for the draw.”
Mr. Rapscallion let out a weary sort of sigh.
“You try your best for people, Billy,” he said. “But you can always depend on them to let you down. With all the books I’ve read, you’d think I would know that by now, wouldn’t you?” He waved the book in his hand at Billy. “This isn’t a great book. It might even be a bad book. But even a bad book demands our respect.”
In spite of what Mr. Rapscallion had told him, Billy found it hard to respect Uplifting Stories for Boys and, at the very least, he believed that Mr. Rapscallion had been joking when he had recommended it to him. Far from being in the least bit scary, the book was full of sunny, happy stories about boys getting Christmas presents and going to summer camp with the Boy Scouts and receiving puppies for their birthdays.
“I’m more than halfway through this stupid book,” he complained to Mr. Rapscallion, “and there’s nothing remotely scary about it. The book is precisely what it says on the cover. A book full of uplifting stories for boys.”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you?” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Never to judge a book by its cover?”
“Yes. But—”
Mr. Rapscallion shook his head. “Keep reading,” he told Billy. “Take my word for it, kid. The book gets better. Much better.”
And so, accepting what Mr. Rapscallion had said about the book, Billy read on; but if anything, the stories seemed to become nicer as he neared the end. And Billy was about to hurl the book aside in disgust when he got to the last story and thought he might as well read it and have done with the book forever, accepting his probable fate as the subject of Mr. Rapscallion’s practical joke.