We’ve only got two weeks before Jake has to turn into a monster for the first time. Gramps, Mrs. McSweeney, and I are pretty sure we’ve got everything set to deal with it. Even so, I’ve decided Jake and I should write down our adventures now, before the big night. After all, if things don’t go the way we hope, his mother will need to know what happened.
The police, too, probably.
I’m going to start because I know Jake will never begin on his own. Once I get the story rolling, I think I can push him to fill in his parts.
So, first things first. I’m Lily Carker, mostly known as “Weird Lily.” I got my nickname when I made the mistake of singing my new song, “How the Wolf Ate Gramma,” for show and tell. It was something I’d just written for my collection Ballads of Death and Destruction, and I was very proud of it. I suppose the fact that I was in second grade at the time didn’t help.
I haven’t made that mistake again.
Even so, the name stuck.
I live with my grandfather, Gnarly, who runs the cemetery.
“Jake” is Jacob Doolittle. Jake lives with his mom on the other side of the cemetery from me and Gramps. Their house is as big and fancy as ours is small and simple. It even has a tower. Awesome!
On the other hand, both houses are pretty run-down.
Jake is the cutest boy in class. Jake himself is kind of clueless about this, but he’s a boy, so that’s to be expected. (It’s probably going to make him mad that I wrote that, but it’s the truth, so there.)
I made a big mistake because of his cuteness when I moved to Needham’s Elbow, back in second grade: I told him I was going to marry him someday.
Actually I told the whole class, since I said it during show and tell.
You’d think I’d learn.
Jacob wouldn’t talk to me for a long time after that.
I can’t say that I blame him.
Here’s how we finally got to be friends: Toward the end of fourth grade I was picking flowers in the old section of the cemetery when I heard someone crying. It’s not unusual for people to cry in the cemetery, of course, but usually it’s over someone who has just died. Since this crying came from the far side of a tombstone dated 1863, I wondered if it might be a ghost. So I peeked around the tombstone.
It wasn’t a ghost—it was Jacob. (He wasn’t “Jake” to me yet.)
It was easy to guess why he was crying. Everyone in our class knew that something had happened a few weeks earlier so that Jacob’s dad wasn’t around anymore. What that something was no one seemed to know, though there were a lot of guesses, some of them pretty nasty.
The thing was, I understood better than most how Jacob felt, since something similar had happened to me just before I finished first grade. At least I knew my parents were still alive, even if they didn’t want me. In Jacob’s case no one seemed to know whether his dad was dead or had simply taken off.
Until his dad disappeared, Jacob had been pretty normal, and pretty popular. After it happened, he started acting strange. (And trust me, I know about strange!) It took me a while to notice, because it was little things … touching his desk three times before he sat down, or making sure his books were properly organized before we went to the cafeteria. If Mrs. Gorton made him get in line before he was ready, I could tell he felt nervous and unhappy. Sometimes I would catch him tapping his fingers against his thumb … little finger, ring finger, middle finger, pointer finger, over and over. After a while I worked out that the faster his fingers were moving, the more upset he was.
Anyway, that day in the cemetery I figured I knew why Jacob was upset. I also figured he didn’t want to talk about it. But I also knew a third thing … sometimes it feels good just to have someone with you when you feel that way.
So I sat down beside him.
Jake lifted his head, glanced at me, then put his head back down. He continued crying, only a bit softer. Finally he stopped, sat up straight, wiped his face, and whispered, “Thanks.”
That was all he said before he got up and walked away.
Even so, things were different after that, and we both knew it.
It started slowly. Jake and I walk to school and the fastest route for both of us is the dirt road through the center of the cemetery. Afternoons I started waiting for him at the cemetery gate. He didn’t seem to mind, and pretty soon we started walking home together directly from school. We got teased, of course … the usual “Oooh, Jacob loves Lily!” kind of crap, but it wasn’t too bad.
After we had been doing this for about a week, Jacob said out of the blue, “Why does your grandfather hate me?”
“He doesn’t hate you!”
“Then how come he yells at me whenever he sees me in the cemetery?”
I frowned. “Okay, I guess he does act like he hates you. I don’t know why.” To change the subject, I turned to something I had been wanting to get off my chest. “Um … about that ‘marry you’ thing in second grade. That must have been pretty embarrassing. I’m sorry.”
Jake smiled. “Yeh, I got teased about it a lot. Now I get teased about other stuff, by everyone but you. So I guess we’re even.”
Relief!
After that things were easier between us, especially when we discovered that we both like monster movies and horror stories. We started to swap books. One day he made my head explode by handing me a stack of novels by Arthur Doolittle.
“He’s my favorite writer!” I cried. “I’ve always thought it was cool that you had the same last name.”
“Of course I have the same last name. He was my grandfather!”
I went a little spazzo then, but Jake shrugged like it was no big deal.
“What happened to him, anyway?” I asked. “I’ve never been able to find out why he wrote so many great books and then just stopped.”
Jake frowned. “Neither has anyone else. Arthur disappeared—”
“You call him Arthur?”
Jake’s face hardened. “He just took off on the family about twenty-five years before I was born. I never met him, and I sure don’t think of him as ‘Grampa’—not after he abandoned my dad that way.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “Family legend says he had been acting crazy for a few years. Then one day he was just … gone. Supposedly he left a note, but I’ve never seen it.”
After a while we started a book club and made a hideout in one of the mausoleums, which are these cool stone buildings in the rich people’s part of the cemetery. They store the bodies above ground (in coffins, of course) instead of burying them.
We cleaned up inside, then made a library, both of us donating books and comics. The real gems came from Jacob, because his grandfather not only wrote horror stories and novels, he also collected them. Jacob didn’t bring any hardcovers, but he contributed several paperbacks, including my all-time favorite Arthur Doolittle book, A World Made of Midnight. This was the story where he first described the monster world that he called Always October. It was also the book that made him famous. Most of the books he wrote afterward featured Always October in some way, but Midnight was always my favorite. I had read it about a dozen times.
Because the air in mausoleums tends to be damp, we kept the books sealed in plastic bags to protect them. Also, Jacob created a file card system to make sure that we knew exactly what we had.
When I asked him why he was so organized, he blushed and said, “Makes me feel safer.”
I thought about it, and figured I understood.
After that day we talked about more personal stuff. We’re almost through sixth grade now, and pretty much best friends.
The day Little Dumpling arrived, Jake and I were in the mausoleum-clubhouse talking about the biggest problems in our lives. At that moment it was Jacob’s third-quarter report card.
“You got an F in math?” I asked, staring at the horrible grade in amazement. “How did you manage that? You’re brilliant at math!”
He shrugged. “Brilliant at math, not so brilliant at homework.”
I knew that the real problem was he spent so much time trying to get his papers perfect that he rarely managed to finish them.
I looked at him sternly. “This is serious, Jacob. I don’t want to have to do seventh grade without you!”
“Ouch!”
“Sorry, but that’s where things are heading. I would take it as a personal favor if you would at least try to pass.”
“I am trying! I just …”
His words trailed off, and his eyes grew wide.
I didn’t have to ask why. I had heard it too.