Everyone in Blue Creek knew the story of Little Charlie, the Wolf Boy of Juno.
The legend that had been passed down told of how Little Charlie, who’d been stolen as a newborn and raised by a pack of desert wolves, was first rescued by a band of outlaws who traded the boy for three bottles of whiskey to some German settlers in the 1880s, who then adopted the untamable Little Charlie out to Ervin and Cecilia Purdy, who were among the first people to establish a home in Blue Creek.
That was the Purdy House, and that was what I was looking at in the photo that lit up the screen of Karim’s phone.
By any standards, the picture that Karim had taken just minutes earlier was unremarkable. There was a big eighteen-wheel semi that curled like a comma, hooked around the circular driveway on the other side of the big iron gates with their rust-smeared NO TRESPASSING signs. The trailer was white, its doors opened at the back, and had a cartoon drawing of an inchworm and dark-green Old English lettering painted along the side that said:
WORMACK MOVING AND STORAGE DON’T MOVE AN INCH! WE’LL DO IT FOR YOU!
And, naturally, on the other side of the unmoving moving truck was the Purdy House, a paint-peeling, rickety old Victorian with lots of pointy things and turrets and small windows, which contributed generously to its creepy reputation.11
I was fascinated by the people in Karim’s photograph. Two of them—obviously the movers, likely with the last name of Wormack—had their backs turned. They were dressed in blue coveralls and were carrying boxes up the front steps toward the open door, which looked like a hungry pitch-black portal to infinite despair and suffering. And there were two people standing on the front porch, watching the guys in coveralls. I couldn’t tell much about the two figures on the porch, whether they were men or women, or how old they were.
“Your new neighbors,” I said. “I could cook them a casserole or something, if you want to be nice to them.”
Karim said, “No.”
It was just as well. Nobody really likes casseroles, anyway.
Well, I mean, I’m sure I could pull one off.
Then Karim took his phone back and enlarged the image with his thumb and first finger, centered the photo, enlarged again, and said, “Because take a look at this, Sam.”
Karim had zoomed in on a narrow dark window on the third floor of the Purdy House. And in the grainy pixelation of max-zoom cell phone imagery, we could both make out the faint gray form of a pale little boy who seemed to be staring out through the glass as though he knew Karim had been taking a photograph at that precise moment.
“Oh my gosh. That’s freaky,” I said, looking away.
“It’s the ghost of Little Charlie!” Karim said.
I tried to sound more confident and grown-up than I felt. “No. The people who are moving in probably have kids, Karim. Right? He’s just their kid, is all, and he’s not just standing up there all alone in that window, staring across like he knows you’re taking a picture. So he’s also not thinking about luring you into the attic and eating you. In which case, it’ll be really cool having some new kids around here for a change.”
“ ‘Having some new kids.’ That’s something cannibals would say when they’re moving in right next door to me,” Karim pointed out. “Sam? Can I stay here at your house for a while?”
“Ha ha,” I laughed as though I were trying to make Karim think that his non-joke was just a joke. “But Dylan and my dad don’t like the Astros, so you’d probably have to get some new pajamas.”
“I have some with Teen Titans on them,” Karim said.
And I thought:
Princess Snugglewarm > Teen Titans
Then Dad knocked on my door again, and if it was possible to do such things, Karim and I would have completely jumped out of our skins, just thinking about the ghost of Little Charlie, the fate of the Purdy family, the boy in the window, the horrible attic, and monsters moving into Blue Creek, Texas.
“Hey, you two knuckleheads! Would your summer book club like to have some breakfast?” Dad said.
11. The Purdy House was the only Victorian in all of Blue Creek, where the majority of the houses were one-level brick midcentury ranches that had been built atop the foundations of the ghost homes that used to be here when the town was originally constructed.