“No one better be gambling in there, or both you guys are going to be in a lot of trouble,” Dad said through my closed bedroom door.
Dad seriously could have taken a few lessons from some of the teachers at Dick Dowling Middle School on how to make authentic scary-sounding threats to twelve-year-old boys.
What was Dad thinking? I don’t even know how to play poker.
“We’re not gambling, Dad. We’re reading. I promise.”
I glared at Karim, the magic lie-telling machine, who just grinned and shrugged.
It turned out that Bahar had been right about screwworms—whatever those are.
The front page of the Hill Country Yodeler had several stories. One was about the opening of the Austin County Fair; another was about how the county had run out of money for its screwworm eradication program;41 another was about how Boy Scout Troop 116 needed to find some new recruits because they were down to just five boys who were all brothers and one cousin; and one was the story Karim and I had been tasked with reading, which was an article about how the town of Blue Creek was attempting to sell off the Purdy House in order to raise money to purchase a new fire truck.
Blue Creek’s Plan to Sell off Unwanted House to Purchase New Fire Truck Goes Bust
Blue Creek’s Town Council is looking for a spare $37,651.48 in order to purchase a much needed fire truck, and they just might have found a solution to their problem: auctioning off the long-abandoned Purdy House. The scheme may have paid off, if only it weren’t for the ghosts and all the other things that go bump in the night.
Last week’s “Fishing for Fire Trucks Fundraiser” at the annual Blue Creek Days celebration only managed to raise a woeful $348.52 toward the targeted cost for a new pumper truck, $38 thousand.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars won’t buy much more than a few dozen buckets and some sand shovels,” said Blue Creek’s honorary mayor, Brock Skoog, who is also the varsity baseball coach and civics teacher at Blue Creek High. Skoog added, “You can’t put out a Russian-atomic-bomb-generated house fire with buckets and shovels.”
Skoog said, “We’re going to need top-of-the-line emergency equipment, given the dangerous actions of the Soviets in our hemisphere, and the Purdy House has sat vacant long enough. The people of Blue Creek should put the home to good use in order to benefit everyone. Winning this crisis means preparedness.”
It is not the first time Blue Creek’s Town Council has attempted to sell the Purdy House. The house was put up for auction in 1933, but at that time there were so many foreclosures in the county that the property attracted no bids whatsoever.
Skoog had been hoping for a better outcome with this attempt, since the home has now stood unoccupied for more than half a century.
Unfortunately for Blue Creek’s all-volunteer fire department, after Skoog and a group of citizens spent a troubling night in the mysterious Purdy House, hopes for making the sale—and purchasing the new fire truck—have all but vanished like the mists of a nightmare.
“After what I saw there, you won’t ever get me to step foot anywhere near that house, not ever again,” said Blue Creek Realtor and hair salon owner Annabelle Hoitink.
Mrs. Hoitink and a group of other council members including Skoog, Patrick Snipes—honorary mayor from 1958—and Shirley Beverly, wife of Cal Beverly of the Blue Creek Fire Department, all spent Tuesday evening inside the old estate in an effort to dispel persistent rumors about the haunting of the Purdy House.
The evening may have been a bust for the Town Council, however, as no more than forty-five minutes into the experiment, all the guests fled the house in fear.
“Almost as soon as we got inside the home, there were odd noises like muffled screams, doors opening and closing by themselves, objects moving in front of our eyes, and two of the guests claim to have seen a shadowy image of a boy standing alone at the top of the staircase,” said Mrs. Hoitink.
“No one in their right mind would ever spend five minutes in that wretched place,” Hoitink exclaimed.
At this point, the Town Council has decided to yet again postpone the auction of the house, with no date determined as yet for when another may be held.
“Who would ever want to buy that place?” asked former mayor Patrick Snipes, adding, “And as far as the new fire truck is concerned, all of Blue Creek might be better off burning down if it will serve to get rid of that particular abomination.”
“And those were reasonable people—responsible grown-ups—who couldn’t even last one hour alone in the Purdy House,” Karim said.
I nodded and glanced at my window, which was pointing in the direction of Karim’s house, which meant it was also pointing at the Purdy House beyond.
“No wonder it’s been empty for so long,” I said.
The new people—the Monster People, as Karim preferred to call them—had been in the house since Sunday, but nobody had seen them, and the town of Blue Creek hadn’t burned to the ground yet.
When Dad knocked on my door to call us out for dinner, we both jumped.
Karim took a deep breath and said, “I’ve had enough of this Purdy House stuff. I wish those people never moved here.”
And just as we were catching our breaths and about to join the rest of my family in the kitchen, both of our phones buzzed with a message from Bahar:
You guys! The people I’m babysitting for are THE PEOPLE who moved into the Purdy House.
Karim looked like he was about to throw up.
I texted back:
Wait—Did you tell them YES?
And Bahar replied:
It was too late to do anything about it by the time they brought me here. They have a little boy. Named Boris.
Bahar was texting us from the Purdy House.
There was so much swirling around in my head at that moment. Bahar’s words “it was too late” were almost as troubling as the fact that the little boy was named Boris, which sounded like the name of every villain in every scary movie ever made.
“They’re probably going to turn Bahar into their thrall now,” Karim said.
I didn’t know what a thrall was.
“What’s a thrall?” I asked.
“You know how in horror movies, a lot of times monsters have humans who are brainwashed into doing whatever the monsters want? Like luring victims to haunted houses and laboratories and windmills and things? That’s what a thrall does.”
Karim knew a lot about monsters and stuff.
My dad knocked on the door again and said, “Guys! Come on before your corn dogs get cold!”
And Bahar sent another text:
I’m about to go inside now. You guys should come over here.
41. I read the whole article, hoping to learn what screwworms are, but the story didn’t say, so I suppose everyone in Texas knew what screwworms were in 1962, and so maybe I’m glad that we don’t have a screwworm crisis today.