“Someone’s moving into the old Purdy place.”
Karim was out of breath from running to my house, and his eyes were as round as Last Chance peaches. He woke me up by knocking on my window, which was open, like it always is no matter what. In most cases, Karim waking me up would have made me mad (this being summer vacation and all), but real people actually moving into the Purdy House, which was Blue Creek’s only legitimately haunted house, was arguably worth the abrupt termination of about two hours’ sleep and a really involved dream about rosewater cardamom pancakes.
What could these people possibly be thinking?
Also, it’s normal for a twelve-year-old boy to have dreams about cooking, right?
I’d found myself questioning nearly everything that had been happening to me—including dreams, which aren’t exactly voluntary—ever since Karim and Bahar had assumed the task of teaching me how to not be such a target for the older kids I’d be living with at boarding school starting in just three Saturdays.9
For any kid in Blue Creek, stories about the Purdy House were even more terrifying than any story about going away to some rich-kids school in Oregon.
“Go around to the front and let yourself in. I don’t think my mom and dad are up yet,” I said.
But after the twenty seconds it took Karim to let himself in the front door and make it to my bedroom had passed, Karim’s thoughts had diverted from what was undoubtedly the most haunted house in the state of Texas to the subject of what Sam Abernathy was wearing.10
“Sam. What are you wearing?” Karim asked.
“What do you mean, what am I wearing? Pajamas. I was in bed. Sleeping. Which is a normal thing for twelve-year-old boys to do at six fifteen in the morning when it’s also summer vacation.”
(I did not ask him whether it’s normal to dream about making rosewater cardamom pancakes. Also, I found myself wondering if we had rosewater and cardamom in the pantry, it being breakfast time and all, and me being suddenly hungry because nothing tastes quite like cardamom, you know?)
Karim shook his head dismissively. “Look, they’re Princess Snugglewarm pajamas. Kids in high school would never wear Princess Snugglewarm pajamas, Sam. I don’t think kids in high school even wear pajamas to begin with. Do you want to get beat up or something? Nobody wants to get beat up in Princess Snugglewarm pajamas.”
It was too early for Karim to be assaulting me with all these implications. First—naturally—of course I did not want to get beaten up. And second, I wasn’t going to ask him the obvious question about how if high school kids don’t wear pajamas, then what do they wear when they sleep? Besides, Princess Snugglewarm was edgy enough for high school, I thought. She was this super-heroic but super-polite cartoon unicorn who went around goring her enemies through the heart with her unicorn horn (which she’d named Betsy), sometimes for ridiculous reasons like the enemy had cut in line or copied homework, or littered, and stuff like that.
“So what’s on your pajamas?” I asked.
Karim sighed. “I’m not the one who’s twelve and all smart and starting live-in high school in a couple weeks. I’ll be twelve right here in seventh grade, not getting beaten up, thank you very much. And besides, it’s the Houston Astros.”
I was confused. “What’s the Houston Astros?”
“On my pajamas.”
“Princess Snugglewarm is cooler and edgier than the Houston Astros,” I pointed out.
Karim had a look in his eyes that said he was going to start an argument about unicorns versus baseball, but I cut him off before he had the chance to. “So. I thought you woke me up over something to do with the Purdy House, but apparently you felt the urgent need to run over here to talk about our pajamas.”
“I’m just worried about whether or not you’ll even survive going away to school in Oregon all by yourself, Sam. But pajamas aside, dude, someone is actually moving INto the Purdy House,” Karim said.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream or something? That house has been empty since before our parents were born.”
Karim frowned. “The moving van woke me up. I looked out my window and saw it pulling up the gravel drive through the woods between our houses. Somebody had even opened the gates to the Purdy House.”
When Karim said “opened the gates to the Purdy House,” his voice dropped to a quavering whisper, the type you’d use when trapped inside a haunted house.
Every kid in Blue Creek had heard the stories about what happens when the Purdy Gates open up. But they were just stories, right?
Karim pulled his phone from the pocket of his shorts, and with his voice still lowered said, “I took some pictures.”
I didn’t know if I actually wanted to look at Karim’s pictures.
There was a low knock at my door, which made me jump.
“Sam? Who are you talking to? Is there someone in your room with you?”
It was my dad.
“Uh—” I was startled, but not because I was mentally replaying all the stories I’d heard about the Purdy House.
Karim, always on his toes, recovered first. “Good morning, Mr. Abernathy! I just came over to talk to Sam about his summer reading assignment. I’m reading with him!”
No matter what, whenever Karim talked to grown-ups, he lied. Sometimes his lies were ridiculous too (like him actually reading George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut), but he never gave up. I didn’t really get it, but Karim always explained it as practice for the “big game,” which to Karim meant being in the sixteen- to eighteen-year-old range, when lying to grown-ups would become a survival skill.
But Karim wasn’t lying about the fact that I did have a summer reading assignment for Pine Mountain Academy. And I hadn’t even started reading my novels yet because I was a little bit intimidated by the fact that the teacher was called “Doctor” something. It was hard enough for me to get used to having MEN for teachers when I got into middle school, but having someone called “Doctor” as a writing teacher was a frightening thing for me to adjust to.
“Oh! Good morning, Karim! Have fun reading, boys!”
Then Dad just went away. We could have been committing murder in there for all he knew, outside of the fact that I wouldn’t ever commit murder, even if Karim wanted me to. But still…
Karim began scrolling through photos.
“Here,” he said, holding the screen in front of my eyes.
The grown-up part of my brain, which was almost constantly at odds with the regular part of my brain, told me that like most of the other townsfolk in Blue Creek, I had bought into a collective myth that was simply made larger and more irrefutable by the fact that so many people believed in it and retold it, generation after generation; and that the Purdy House was just an old empty house that would now have actual, non-demonic, non-cannibalistic, normal everyday people living inside it.
The regular part of my brain has always been a better arguer, however.
9. And yes, thinking about this sent electricity through the thousands of spiders twitching in my stomach.
10. I should add that Karim was never a knock-before-entering kind of friend; that’s how it was our whole lives. He might just as well have been a silent breeze entering our home on a humid summer morning as far as the rest of my family was concerned, and this was Blue Creek, after all. Nobody locked their doors here, not even the people who lived nearest to the Purdy House, who happened to be Karim and his parents.