by Andrew Smith
Walking into the downstairs living room felt like walking out onto a stage in front of an enormous audience. There were so many eyes looking at me—maybe hundreds of them—and they were all unblinking, pointed into the center of the room, black and frozen in expressions of rage, astonishment, and fear.
And they were all dead.
I saw a wild pig with a pipe in his mouth wearing an old German hiking hat, standing on the hearth of the stone fireplace, over which hung an enormous wooden plaque with the snarling head of a bear and his two disembodied front feet with claws unnaturally spread open like he was making “jazz hands” at us; a grinning alligator that had been turned into a glass-topped coffee table; a python with its mouth open in some kind of gruesome, frozen, hissing bite, that was coiled around the bottom of a potted plant;66 a mother skunk, out for a stroll along the baseboards, followed by three tiny baby skunks that looked like photocopies of each other; a couple of decapitated deer and elk; a smiling Siamese house cat with a starched ball of yarn unraveling between its claws; a large snapping turtle standing up on its hind legs,67 eyes and mouth wide, front arms arched like a boxer’s, in some kind of bizarre fight with a koala bear, like in one of those cheesy old dinosaur movies where a brontosaurus and a stegosaurus square off at the edge of a cliff; hawks, vultures, owls, blue jays, ducks, pheasants hanging in petrified flight; and in one corner, standing on a round end table next to an old wingback chair upholstered in zebra skin, was the notorious raccoon lamp, even more hideous up close than I might have ever dreamed, and yes, one of its hind legs had lost all its fur.
The raccoon lamp was also wearing little wire-framed glasses and a miniature sailor’s cap, and it was posed with both of its arms up in the air, like it was in the process of being arrested or something.
It was all so terrifying, and so incredibly weird.
After spending one night there babysitting, Bahar must have already gotten used to the decor inside the Purdy House, but Brenden looked at me, his eyes wide and the corners of his mouth turned down as though he was considering that we had been transported into an actual horror show.
There were just so many unmoving eyes, and so many rows of exposed teeth. I never realized animals could snarl as much as the ones inside the Purdy House did.
“Sorry about all the clutter,” Mr. Blank said. “We plan on moving most of our babies into the shop, once we find one, that is!”
And I thought, Did he just call them his babies?
Mrs. Blank took us into the dining room (more eyes and teeth) and the kitchen, which seemed to be the designated room for housing mounted and lacquered dead fish (so you usually only saw one eye at a time),68 and left us on our own to assemble the evening meal.
Naturally Boris, who was both fascinated and challenged by the nonspeaking Brenden, never stayed more than a few inches away from him.
“Hey, kid.” Boris tugged on Brenden Saltarello’s perfectly white, creased shirtsleeve. “Hey, you. Kid. Hey. Hey.”
“He doesn’t talk,” I reminded Boris. “Just think of him as something you’d have mounted on your wall.”
But that was no deterrent to Boris, who continued his tugging and pestering, while Brenden gave me an I don’t want to be a thing on their wall look.
“Hey. Hey, kid. Hey. What’s your name again?”
“Brenden. His name is Brenden,” I said. “But he doesn’t talk.”
Brenden Saltarello unpacked the place settings and carried them out into the dining room, Boris practically attached to his elbow. It was pretty impressive, because not only did Brenden refuse to break under Boris’s relentless pestering, but he knew exactly how to set a proper table too.
“Hey. Hey, kid. Hey, Brenden. After dinner, do you want to go play down in the basement?” Boris said.
Horrifying.
I said, “No, he does not.”
I had all the food out, and began putting the final touches on the presentation. It was almost time to serve. Bahar lit candles in the dining room. Everything was as perfect as it would have been if we were being photographed for one of those fancy food magazines, except for how badly my chef’s uniform fit, and all the horrible dead creatures that were everywhere in the house. There was even a small bobcat in the centerpiece of the dining table that was missing an eye and had its mouth forever stretched back in a ridiculously wide yawn, or maybe it was trying really hard to cough up an uncooperative hair ball. The bobcat’s front paws had little brackets on them that held salt and pepper shakers.
Who would ever eat salt and pepper from the paws of a one-eyed choking dead bobcat?
I continued, “Brenden doesn’t talk, and he doesn’t play in basements, either.”
Boris was un-swayed.
“Hey. Hey, Brenden, have you ever had to hide inside a dumpster in order to get away from a hungry mountain lion?”
Brenden Saltarello didn’t need to say anything. He just gave me a look that said, Please make this kid go away.
“Hey. Hey, kid. Hey, kid named Brenden who doesn’t talk. If you tell me just one thing, I promise I’ll leave you alone for a little while,” Boris said.
And even Bahar tried running interference on Boris, but it didn’t work. She said, “Oh, Boris. Why don’t you go tell your parents they can sit at the table now? Sam’s just about ready to serve dinner.”
“You’re the babysitter,” Boris said. “And that Brenden guy who doesn’t talk is the helper boy. Do you all think it’s fair for the two of you to make me do your work like that? Are you trying to trick me into leaving or something? You hate me, don’t you? You probably hate all children—except for that kid boyfriend of yours who wears a skirt sometimes when he’s not dressed in giant man clothes that don’t fit and cooks disgusting stuff that nobody would ever eat and then tries to call it food.”
Now Boris had gone too far on multiple levels.
It’s not a skirt; it’s a kilt.
And I was not Bahar’s boyfriend.
Also, Boris was still pinching the sleeve of Brenden’s shirt between his thumb and index finger.
Bahar nervously ahem-ed and then said, “I’ll go call Mr. and Mrs. Blank.”
“Let go of Brenden, and I’ll tell you what we’re having for dinner,” I said, with no intention at all of telling Boris what I had actually prepared. And Brenden looked like a fish who’d just spit out a hook and jumped off the line when Boris released his sleeve.
“Okay. I did it. What are we having?” Boris asked.
I pulled a chair out. “Here. Have a seat.”
Boris sat, and I wondered if there was any duct tape or rope lying around, but then I thought that things like tying up kids would probably be bad for Bahar’s future business.
So I said, “Tonight I’ve prepared a pappardelle with duck breast, mustard, and juniper berries.”69
Boris’s face mimicked the hair-ball-coughing one-eyed bobcat’s.70
Then he said this: “That sounds really great!”
What an awful child. What a horrible thing to say.
“Well, of course it does,” I said.
“I thought you said it was chicken potpie,” said Brenden, who’d obviously forgotten that he didn’t talk.
“Does that have chicken in it?” Boris asked. “I hate chicken. I hate pie.”
If there was a portal to the underworld in the Purdy House, Brenden Saltarello had just opened it, I thought.
Thankfully, before all the demons of Hades could escape, Bahar came in, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Blank.
66. There was a taxidermied rat with a distinctive Oh my! expression on his little rat face stretched across the snake’s tongue.
67. And turtles do NOT stand like that.
68. Think about it—fish have an eye on each side of their head, so you usually only see one eye. The exception was a lone gar fish that was mounted (just its head and about one third of its body) coming straight out of the wall, mouth wide open and filled with dozens of glistening needlelike teeth.
69. As far as I know, this dish does not exist. But I thought it sounded like something I might try.
70. Except for the fact that Boris had both of his eyes.
THE SECRET EATER
No one among us had ever expected the things that would happen that night at the Purdy House.
Throughout the dinner, Boris sat with his lower lip poked out and his arms crossed tightly, staring at his meal as though lasers were about to fire from his eyes and vaporize the entire table.
Beth Blank said, “This is the best meal I’ve had in ages!”
I felt myself blushing. Brenden and I stood quietly by the entrance to the kitchen like some kind of dinner sentries. It would have been unforgivable for either of us to actually eat in front of the clients.
And at some point, Beth Blank turned to Bahar with a serious look on her face and said, “Boris likes to play tricks on babysitters. Just so you know, he is not allowed to take baths in milk or Mountain Dew, cottage cheese, or canned pork-and-beans.”
He’s taken baths in cottage cheese and canned pork-and-beans? I thought.
“Knowing this will make things a lot easier,” Bahar said.
That would be a lot of cans of beans to open too.
So Timmy and Beth Blank thanked me and Brenden one more time after dinner, which Boris sat through but did not eat, and then they left to go into Blue Creek while Brenden and I cleaned up. But a few times during the meal, Beth Blank made excuses for Boris’s eccentric71 behavior: “Don’t feel bad about Boris, Sam. He’s a very fussy eater. Most nights, I’ll wake up at two or three in the morning only to hear him rummaging around in the house, looking for food.”
I bet you do, I thought.
“Boris is a secret eater,” Timmy Blank said, and when he said “secret eater,” he winked at me.
I wondered how many secrets Boris had eaten in his little six-year-old life.
So it was just when Brenden and I had finished packing things up to haul back home (where Karim was still hiding and pouting, probably) that Bahar called out to us from somewhere in the maze of rooms inside the Purdy House.
“Sam? Brenden? I can’t find Boris, and there are bats coming out of the fireplace!”
Brenden looked at me, eyes wide, with an expression that almost asked if maybe the Purdy House was like a sanctuary for wandering vampires, which, if it was, that part of the story had never been reported in the Hill Country Yodeler.
Brenden and I went out into the living room, but it was already getting too dark to see.
“This is creepy,” Brenden whispered.
“I’ll turn on the raccoon,” I said.
And that was when the first very strange thing happened—or seemed to happen.72
I found a little switch on the electrical cord coming out of the raccoon73 that turned on the bulb poking through the sailor’s cap, and out of the poor, bald-legged creature’s skull, and when the light came on, I noticed that the raccoon seemed to be standing in a different position, with his arms crossed in front of his little chest,74 and the raccoon’s tiny wire-framed glasses were now missing.
And when the light came on, I also saw something that was engraved on a small brass plate on the wooden base beneath the raccoon’s hind legs that said this:
ISHMAEL (1885–1891)
BELOVED PET AND COMPANION
No wonder Ishmael’s leg was bald—he was almost one hundred fifty years old.
Also, something struck me as odd and familiar about the raccoon’s name, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was.
Bahar stood near the fireplace and the wild pig in the hiking hat, who also seemed to have been strangely repositioned into a running pose. And the bear head above the mantel was different too. Its former “jazz hands” had been transformed into two enthusiastic bear thumbs-up, as though he were sincerely approving of our performance. Bahar held on to the little ash broom from the fireplace set, and waved it toward the ceiling, where—yes—two bats were flying around and around, making absolutely no sound at all outside the occasional thumps and thuds produced by fluttering into the walls.
“We need to open some windows!” Brenden said, but the first one he tried—the one behind the sofa where the mother skunk had been parading her stuffed babies, who all seemed to have magically migrated to the opposite side of the room—would not move an inch.
“It’s stuck,” he said.
The bats kept circling wildly, battering themselves against the walls as Bahar tried to sweep them away.
Brenden tried another window, but like the first one, it wouldn’t budge. In fact, none of the windows in the entire downstairs of the Purdy House was functional.
Thump! Thump! went the bats.
“Hey! The koala bear is different!” Bahar said.
Sure enough, the koala bear (the one that had been posed in a fistfight with the snapping turtle) had moved. The snapping turtle was now turned onto its back, and the koala was straddling the underside of its shell, one little koala hand grasping the turtle’s neck and the other clenched in a fist, about to punch the turtle square in the face.
And the snapping turtle had an expression that seemed to say, Did I say something wrong?
I guess koala bears and snapping turtles just naturally hate each other.
At least I had finally found something here in Blue Creek that I was not going to mind saying good-bye to at all: the Purdy House.
“Try opening the front door,” I said to Brenden as the bats continued to circle and thud, circle and thud.
I suppose we all started to panic when Brenden announced that the front door was stuck shut. Well, when I say “we all,” I pretty much mean me and Brenden.
Bahar never panicked about anything.
But we were trapped inside the Purdy House, just like my dad, Linda Swineshead, and his friend Oscar Padilla had been trapped there all those years before. And to make matters worse, Boris was hiding or missing, and just when Brenden had told us that the door to the outside and the usually sane part of Blue Creek was hopelessly jammed, we’d heard the faintest sound like singing coming up through the air from somewhere far below our feet.
We all froze, held our breath, and listened. It sounded like a chorus of voices, but a hundred miles away. We couldn’t make out what exactly was being sung to us, and the bats continued their tireless crashing into the walls, which was actually louder than the music.
Brenden and I both screamed when something said, “I’m up in the attic!” even though the something that said it was up in the attic happened to be a six-year-old boy named Boris Blank. Still, just the thought of being inside that horrible Purdy House with all those stuffed dead animals that seemed to move by themselves, bats coming out of the fireplace, music from belowground, and all the doors and windows sealed tight was almost too much to handle.
Bahar seemed unfazed. She held on to the brass fireplace broom and shouted up the stairway, “Boris, come downstairs now!”
“I want to play hide-and-seek,” called Boris’s ghostly voice from somewhere above (while the singing and bat-thumping continued). “You’re supposed to find me, in case you were wondering what kinds of things real babysitters do!”
Bahar lowered her ash broom and marched through the foyer toward the staircase.
She said to me, “Remind me to never babysit for Boris Blank, ever again.”
“I think I could do that,” I said.
Brenden rattled the doorknob again, but nothing happened.
And after about five seconds beneath the swirling bats, standing in the middle of all those eyes and the animals that had mysteriously changed positions, I decided I’d rather be upstairs in the attic with Bahar than trapped down here with Brenden and the singing, and all of the Blanks’ extremely creepy babies.
As I climbed the stairs, I never stopped for a second to consider that attics are always the creepiest part of any creepy house.
71. Sometimes people use words like “eccentric” because it’s nicer than saying “anno
ying” or “repulsive.”
72. To be honest, it wasn’t the first, but it was one of those Purdy House–type things that nobody was expecting.
73. In a place where you wouldn’t ever want an electrical cord coming out of.
74. The same way Boris had been sitting during dinner.
THE BRAINS AND BELLIES OF A HAUNTED HOUSE
One does not simply go, unaccompanied, looking for the entrance to the attic of a haunted house.
That was a rule to live by, but unfortunately, it was not one I’d thought about before running upstairs after Bahar.
Attics are like the brains of haunted houses.
I didn’t wait to ask if Brenden was coming with me, and I couldn’t see or hear Bahar. But when I got up to the third floor of the Purdy House,75 there were two of those super-creepy pull-down attic ladders at opposite ends of the upper hallway, both of them opened, and they were pointing in opposite directions as though the house had two separate attics.
Two brains.
And I naturally chose the wrong one.
I climbed up.
The room that I reached was very small and very dark. There was no window and no light switch, either. From what little bit of light was coming up through the trapdoor, I could see that along one wall there were shelves cluttered with jars and small boxes, as well as a few pieces that must have been Mr. Blank’s “works in progress.” Another wall seemed to be the house’s main electrical panel, with switches labeled KITCHEN, LIVING ROOM, BASEMENT, and so on.
But it only took me about a second to realize two things: first, this was not where Boris and Bahar were; and second, what the (excuse me) heck was I doing inside such a small, dark, windowless room?
I took a deep breath and turned back toward the trapdoor ladder I’d climbed to get there, but I must have grabbed on to the mechanism that releases the catch, because in just a matter of seconds, the ladder retracted and folded upward, closing me inside.