by Andrew Smith
And Boris’s dad went on, “We’re new to Blue Creek. We’re hoping to make this our permanent home and open up a business here. We’re the Blanks. I’m Timmy, and this is Beth, and I’m pretty sure you and Boris have already met each other!”
“Um. Welcome to Blue Creek,” I said.
No grown-up men are ever named Timmy, I thought, especially not in Texas. The name had to be fake.
“You’re also the little boy who got trapped in a well, right?” Beth Blank said.
Apparently, I was correct in my assumption that their Realtor had told them everything about what made Blue Creek famous—except for the part about the Purdy House, that is.
I squinted at Boris. He squinted back like he was waiting to see who’d make the first move. And I wondered what kind of business they were planning on opening here in Blue Creek. We already had one cemetery and one funeral home, and that was enough. And I also couldn’t help but wonder about their last name: Blank.
“He’s not very nice. He took a picture of me because he said he thought I was someone from a war,” Boris said.
“Oh, Boris!” Beth Blank said.
“And he’s not funny, either,” Boris went on. “All he does is talk. And I didn’t like my haunted burger. What was that stuff on it?”
“You mean orange and fennel?” I said, immediately hating myself for falling into the black hole of Boris’s unpleasantness.
“Yeah. That stuff. Orange and fennel. I never eat stuff like that because I hate it,” Boris said.
And Timmy Blank, Boris’s dad, said, “Boris is funny.”
Hilarious, I thought.
Timmy Blank continued, “Well, Beth and I were just talking, and we’d really like to try out your catering service, so we wanted to see if you’d be available to make dinner for the three of us, plus a guest.”
And this was one of those things—an impulse—that I absolutely could not control, because it involved cooking.
I immediately said, “When?”
“How about Friday night, if you’re not already booked? Beth and I are going to be looking at some commercial property for our taxidermy shop, and we thought it would be fun if we ordered dinner in for all of us.”
Taxidermy. Mr. and Mrs. Blank stuffed dead animals. This explained so much.
“ ‘All of us’?” I said.
Timmy Blank cleared his throat. “Yeah. Well, we’re going to be leaving to look at some more storefronts. So it would be for the three of us, and Boris’s babysitter, Bahar. You’re friends with Bahar, right?”
And when Timmy Blank said “friends,” he winked at me.
No.
But I still couldn’t help myself.
“What time?” I asked.
“Let’s say six,” Beth Blank said.
I had mindlessly crossed over the line and had become a cooking thrall. Or a preparing thrall.
“Is there anything in particular you’d like me to prepare? I have a sample menu here somewhere,” I said.
Timmy Blank answered, “You can surprise us! Maybe if it works out, we’ll hire you for a fancy dinner party when we’re all settled in, and invite all our new neighbors!”
He obviously had no idea that none of his fancy new neighbors would ever set foot in the Purdy House.
Then Mr. Blank added, “Would forty dollars per person be fair? One hundred sixty for the dinner? And dessert, too, naturally.”
“Naturally,” I said. It was like I was in a trance. A hundred and sixty dollars could buy a few decent kitchen gadgets, and some Princess Snugglewarm merch.
And Boris added, “Nothing with oranges and fennels. I hate that stuff.”
So, just like that, I was stuck. And all the way downtown to the library, I kept asking myself, How did I let this happen? The Purdy House had lured in Bahar, and that was bad enough, but now it was about to get me, too.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
I’d have to concoct some scheme to sign Karim on as my assistant, I thought.
54. I served them with mini polenta hush puppies and not fries, which I was sure Boris would have told me ahead of time that he did not like.
55. It was the same shirt as Boris’s, only with fewer food stains on it.
SOMEONE’S GOT A CRUSH ON SOMEONE
“Someone who happens to be six years old and also happens to be named Boris came to Lily Putt’s twice in the last three days,” I said. “Here. I even took a picture of him.”
We were all sitting on the sofa in the library’s media center. I held my phone out so Bahar and Karim could see the shot I’d taken through the snack bar’s window that day.
Bahar nodded knowingly. “Yep. That’s Boris.”
“Taking pictures of strange little six-year-old kids is kind of creepy, Sam,” Karim said.
I put away my phone. “ ‘Creepy’ doesn’t even begin to describe Boris.”
I lowered my voice to the kind of whisper you’d use in one of those scenes where all the lights go out in a horror film. “I saw his mom and dad, too. I talked to them. I made them all Little Charlie’s Haunted Burgers. They eat real food. Well. I think they do, at least. I didn’t actually see any of them eat anything. They only said they liked it.”
“My theory is that Boris and his parents just absorb nutrients though their skin in the bathwater, which explains the milk and Diet Coke thing,” Karim said. Then I saw him typing on his phone another entry on the list of things he knew about the Monster People.
I kept my voice in a whisper. “Yeah. But they’re hiring me to cook dinner for them tomorrow night.”
“Dude. You’re going inside the Purdy House? To feed them?” Karim asked, horrified.
“I know. I don’t know what came over me, but when they asked if I could do it, and then told me how much they were willing to pay, I just couldn’t say no.”
Karim shook his head and made a kind of pitying click with his tongue.
“I’ll be there. I’m sitting for Boris again,” Bahar said.
“Karim, you have to be my helper. Come with me,” I said.
“Sorry. I don’t cook, Sam.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“I’d do it for you,” I said.
“No you wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t say yes to going inside that place. Not ever. What were you thinking?”
I put my face in my hands and rested my elbows on my knees. I was so confused. Maybe they had put me under some kind of trance-inducing spell or something.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said.
I was on the verge of tears, but no kid in a kilt wants to cry inside a public library. Maybe I’d ask Mom or Dad to call the Monster People and cancel the catering job.
But I could never cancel a cooking opportunity. So I just sat there and tried not to cry, unsure of what I’d gotten myself into, or what I was going to do about it.
“Hey, Karim, Bahar. Hey, Sam.”
None of us had even noticed that Brenden Saltarello had been there the whole time, watching a stream from a baseball game on one of the library’s computers.
Karim didn’t say anything.
Bahar said, “Hi, Brenden.”
“I like the kilt, Sam. Pretty daring,” Brenden said. “Maybe one day it’ll catch on here in Blue Creek.”
Then I wasn’t only miserable. I was also embarrassed. I should have changed into regular Texas-kid clothes before leaving the golf course, but I’d been too disoriented and confused by what had happened with Boris and his parents.
“Huh. Maybe,” I said.
I tucked my kilt between my knees and crossed my legs. I suddenly felt as though the entire world was looking at me, and it made me very uncomfortable. That was the thing about Dad’s kilt-wearing requirements: sometimes I entirely forgot that we were living in Texas, which was a very big state with an unsurprisingly small number of guys who wore kilts.
“Well, I mean, I’d wear one, I think, even though my family’s Italian. So there’s probabl
y a dress-code regulation about that somewhere,” Brenden said.
“You could just call it a plaid mini-toga or something,” I offered.
Then Brenden Saltarello laughed.
I noticed that Karim was definitely not laughing. In fact, he was staring with the same squinty gunslinger eyes that Boris had used on me an hour earlier.
It almost seemed that Karim was jealous or something.
I just didn’t get any of this.
Brenden put on his headphones and turned back to the game he’d been watching.
Karim continued to glare.
Bahar looked at Karim, then at me, and shrugged. Then she mouthed: Someone’s got a crush on someone.
Ugh. This was all too much for me. I could feel the surface temperature of my skin rise by about ten degrees, and could only imagine I was redder than the deepest red on my Clan Abernathy tartan. And I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if Bahar had been thinking about having our usual iced tea again on Saturday, which was just a couple of days from now.
If we made it past Friday, that is.
“Uh. I really need to go home and put on some regular clothes and get some reading done for school,” I said.
It felt like the spiders were doing the wave around and around and around in my stomach.
Bahar said, “Wait. We have one last article. This is the best one, Sam. You’ll see why. It’s from 1994, and there’s someone you know in it.”
I didn’t want to know anyone who’d ever had anything to do with the Purdy House, but now I was stuck, and what had I been thinking? What was I possibly going to prepare for dinner for the Monster People?
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE MONSTER PEOPLE (PART 5)
What Everyone Needs to Know about the Monster People:
Have not been seen in daylight. May be vampires.
Have a lamp made out of a dead raccoon.
Have a hideous black flying beast that is bulletproof and comes out of their house at night during all the screaming.
Have a coffin buried fifty feet below the ground to keep the Wolf Boy from digging it up again.
Have a kid named Boris.
May be transforming Bahar into a mindless thrall with no will of her own.
Boris absorbs nutrients through his skin in his bathwater.
They have now begun an indoctrination spell on Sam.
SAM IS NOT ALLOWED TO TELL JOKES TO BRENDEN SALTARELLO EVER AGAIN!!!
Their last name is BLANK.
THE OTHER ABERNATHY
No one who’s twelve years old ever thinks about how their dad was also at one time a kid.
It was a truth that was too big to wrap my head around.
For all my life, my dad had always seemed so grown-up, never changing—the kilt-wearing, survival-camping, golf-course-owning, unofficial pep rally leader, ex-banker, and perennial optimist of Blue Creek, Texas.
But when confronted by the overwhelming evidence, I had to face the fact that my father indeed had once been a child, and not only that, but a child who’d apparently liked grunge rock and had at one time been arrested for breaking the law in the very town where I’d been born and spent my entire life.
“My dad must have been really relieved the day I fell into the well,” I said. “That way, for sure all the people in Blue Creek would stop talking about him and only talk about the other Abernathy.”
Because this is what the 1994 article from the Hill Country Yodeler revealed about my dad and the Purdy House:
Blue Creek Teens Detained after Being Trapped inside Abandoned Purdy House
Three incoming ninth-grade students from Blue Creek High School were arrested Friday night after finding themselves trapped inside an empty house on North Detweiler Road.
The teens, Davey56 Abernathy, 13, Oscar Padilla, 14, and Linda Swineshead, 13, all recent graduates of Dick Dowling Middle School, unknowingly locked themselves inside the long-abandoned Purdy House after accepting a dare from incoming members of the Blue Creek High School freshman football squad, to spend three hours inside the shuttered home on the night of last week’s full moon.
“We sure didn’t mean to cause any problems,” Abernathy said. “We just wanted to show we were brave enough to do it, because the other boys had been making fun of me and Oscar. Linda didn’t want us to go there, but she came along so she could stop us from doing anything stupid, which didn’t really work out. Because once we got inside, the doors and windows seemed to lock all by themselves, and we were stuck.”
“Davey was going to do it alone, but I wouldn’t let him,” Padilla said. “He’s my best friend, and I was afraid he’d get eaten by that cannibal ghost or something.”
The Purdy House has long been rumored to be haunted, and has been the focus of several recent paranormal studies. To date, stories of a cannibalistic wild boy named Charlie Purdy, the house’s fabled inhabitant, have never been substantiated.
Abernathy, wearing baggy jeans and a hole-pocked Nirvana T-shirt, was released early Saturday morning into the custody of his grandmother, gospel singer Lily Abernathy, owner of Blue Creek’s Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course. The sheriff has not yet determined whether charges will officially be filed against Abernathy and the other teens.
“This is a tough call. The house has sat there empty for so long, it’s like nobody cares about it beyond its reputation as some sort of local nuisance. All empty houses do is attract trouble, I’ll tell you. But if being dumb was a crime, there’s no doubt these three kids would be facing the judge,” Sherriff Cole Glick said.
Padilla and Abernathy had both recently dropped out of the Blue Creek High summer football training session, and claimed they had something to prove to the other boys on the team who’d teased Abernathy and dared the boys that they were not brave enough to spend time inside the house, which holds a frightening reputation in Blue Creek history. The third teen, Linda Swineshead, went along in support of her boyfriend, Davey Abernathy.57
The three youths climbed over the locked gates and entered the house through a loose basement hopper window, which, once inside, proved to be too high for the teens to use as an exit. While the teens were inside the house, members of the Blue Creek High School freshman football team waited outside, timing the duration of the stay.
“As soon as we got inside the house, weird things started happening. We heard noises—like singing—coming from somewhere underground, and sounds like something was being dragged back and forth across the floor up in the attic,” Abernathy said.
“We didn’t realize that the window was too high for us to climb back out, and then Oscar [Padilla] found this little secret tunnel, but he got trapped behind the doorway, and that’s when me and Linda [Swineshead] got really scared. We tried to get out of the house through the front doors, but they were sealed shut, so we went back down to the basement and started yelling for help below the window where we came in, but it was stuck shut too, and I don’t think anyone heard us,” Abernathy said.
After three hours had passed with no sign of Abernathy, Padilla, and Swineshead, the football players outside went to a nearby house and called Sheriff Glick. None of the players remained present at the scene to provide an account of the trespassing to law enforcement.
Speaking on conditions of anonymity, one of the football players said, “We argued about going over to tell Miss Lily Abernathy that Davey was killed, but we decided she’d find out eventually anyway.”
According to Abernathy, Padilla had become trapped inside a narrow crawl space leading from the basement to a small room that had been dug deeper underground than the basement. “There wasn’t any light anywhere,” Abernathy said, “but Oscar told us how the place lit up by itself when he got inside, and then he started screaming at us because he couldn’t get out through the little door, and he thought he saw a ghost and what looked like a coffin just sitting there in the middle of the floor, and there was an armadillo that came running toward Oscar, which really scared him because Osca
r is afraid of armadillos.”
Glick released Padilla and Swineshead to their parents’ custody late Friday evening, while Abernathy, the confessed ringleader of the break-in, remained in the sheriff’s detention until his parents could be located the next morning.
“Everyone does foolish things when they’re kids,” Glick said, “but breaking into that old Purdy House has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of in all my years of law enforcement here in Blue Creek. I hope those three learned their lesson and are done with it now.”
When we finished reading the article, Bahar and Karim just stared at me, obviously waiting for me to confess to something that I had no idea I was guilty of.
“My dad never told me anything about getting trapped inside the Purdy House,” I said.
“Maybe he’s got a huge criminal record besides just that,” said Karim, always encouraging. Then he added, “Being called a ringleader when you’re only thirteen says a lot about your reputation as a scofflaw.”
And Bahar said, “I wonder what he’s going to say when you tell him you’re going there tomorrow night.”
I put my head in my hands again and said, “Ugh.”
And where had Karim ever learned a word like “scofflaw”?58
56. Davey? Davey? This was already too much to handle.
57. Wait. Dad had a girlfriend when he was THIRTEEN? Named Linda Swineshead? I can’t even…
58. A “scofflaw” is a delinquent.
SOMETIMES CODE BETWEEN FRIENDS CAN FAIL MISERABLY
Someone was trying to call me.
We’d said good-bye to Bahar at the clearing in the woods where all the piled-up debris formed a little Texas Eiffel Tower above Sam’s Well, and were heading back to my house when my phone started buzzing in my pocket.
It was James Jenkins.
And for more than just a moment, I felt conflicted about what to do. I really wanted to talk to James about so many things, but I really did not want to talk to James while Karim was listening to all those things I needed to ask him about.
I watched the screen on my phone, frozen for an instant on the tightrope stretched between wanting to answer it and wanting to hang up.