LITTLE CHARLIE HEARS MY CALL

One does not simply disregard the NO TRESPASSING signs that hang on the gates of the Purdy House.

I mean, in many ways the notices themselves looked more menacing than the two-word warning emblazoned across each of them. The signs had to have been a hundred years old, white, with peeling oxidized red uppercase letters painted on metal that oozed streaks of rust like blood, and here and there bubbling scabs where corrosion had been steadily decaying upward through their surfaces.

If the signs came to life, they would truly be monsters.

I had never been this close to the Purdy House in my entire life. Now here I was standing just inches from the gates. I did not touch them, however.

The lights were on in every window, except for the ones on the third floor and in the attic. Naturally, haunted houses never have lights on up there. The old orange Volvo was gone, and the porch stood, silent and cluttered with empty boxes.

I tried a text again:

Hey, Bahar, I’m outside the gates right now.

Then I thought to play off all the ridiculous things that I’d been imagining (or not), like it was just another Tuesday night in Blue Creek:

How’s it going with the babysitting?

And:

How’s the dead raccoon?

Followed by:

What kind of food do they keep in their refrigerator?

You can always tell so much about people by the food they keep inside their refrigerator, just like you can tell a lot about people by the dead animals they use as lighting fixtures.

I waited. Crickets and cicadas seemed to be yelling at me from the dark. I imagined an entire insect kingdom arguing about whether or not the little kid they were watching should knock—or try to actually open the gates to the Purdy House. I looked up into the sky above the roofline of the house. No gigantic black-winged beast blotting out the stars. Then I got mad at myself for even thinking about a gigantic black-winged beast, because Bahar would have told me how irrational I was being.

But the thing was, Bahar was not telling me anything.

There was still no answer from her to any of the text messages I’d sent.

I reached up and made a fist, cocked it back like I was intending to knock. But if I knocked on the gate, nobody inside would hear it, and it would probably hurt my knuckles on top of everything else. So I formed an O around my mouth with my hands, aimed myself between a gap in the iron bars of the gate, and whisper-shouted, “Bahar!”

To be honest, I’ve been louder in libraries and nobody ever gave me a second look.

I tried it again. “Bahar?”

But I still couldn’t get much volume. My throat was just too tight.

So I braced myself for what I knew I had to do: I decided I would simply open the gates, step up to the front door of the Purdy House, and knock like someone inside owed me money or something; like I had a job to do.

Easy, right?

I lowered my hand to the latch.

“HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Karim shouted at me from across the gravel road in front of the Purdy House.

And I screamed louder than I had ever screamed in my life.

Then Karim screamed louder than he had ever screamed in his life.

And for just a fraction of a second, as Karim and I were both screaming and I was turning away from those old creepy gates to run for my life, I thought, This must be why they called it the Screaming House.

I caught a glimpse of Karim standing along the roadway as I darted from the gates. His eyes looked like headlights on a fire truck, and he was pointing a hand up toward the house behind me.

“He’s up there!” Karim shrieked.

I glanced back, and sure enough, up on the third floor⁴⁷ one of the narrow windows had been illuminated, and standing there, perfectly still and ghostlike, looking down to precisely where Karim and I were experiencing sheer terror, was the figure of a pale little boy dressed in what looked like one of those old nightshirt things that people used to wear a century ago.

“It’s Little Charlie the cannibal!” Karim said.

I was so scared that there were literally tears leaking from my eyes.

And I thought, Me. I am the kind of food they keep in their refrigerator.

Karim was right behind me, which kind of made me feel like I was being chased, so I ran faster. And then everything got much, much worse when Karim began to yell, “There’s something crawling on me! There’s something crawling on me!”

Which made me run even faster, which made Karim run faster too.

We did not stop running until we had gotten back to the clearing near Sam’s Well. Then Karim and I both collapsed into the grass of the field, where we panted and gasped for several minutes before we finally calmed down enough to say anything.

What was crawling on Karim was a cicada as big as my hand. It had gotten inside his T-shirt, and Karim had the creature balled up in a twisted wad of shirt.

“Sam. Can you get this thing off me?”

I do not touch cicadas. Not ever. Karim knew that.

In fact, I am as afraid of cicadas as I am of any imaginary demons and ghouls that may or may not haunt the Purdy House. I can’t even look at a cicada without wanting to give up on life entirely.

“Karim, you’re my best friend, but no.”

And the trapped cicada inside Karim’s T-shirt made a soft and terrifying little hideous scream, which is what trapped cicadas do sometimes.

“Some friend you are,” said Karim, who’d been living in my room since last Sunday.

He got to his feet, and keeping the wadded-up cicada tangled inside his hand, he pulled his T-shirt off and threw it on top of the mountain of concrete and rebar plugging the opening to Sam’s Well.

And I said, “You were the one who left me to go to the Purdy House all alone.”

“You didn’t quite get there, did you?”

“You screamed at me. That’s why,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have screamed if I hadn’t seen Little Charlie getting ready to eat you. I saved your life,” Karim said.

“If it makes you feel good, believe it,” I said.

I stood up and shook out my clothes, just in case any other cicadas had decided to hitch a ride away from the Purdy House.

“You owe me a shirt,” Karim, who had already ruined a pair of my socks today, told me.

I just shook my head. Panting, exhausted, and terrified, we started back toward my house. I couldn’t really tell if we were mad at each other, but I’m pretty sure we were. Best friends get that way sometimes.

“So. Who’s going to be the one to do it?” Karim asked between gulps of air.

“Do what?” I said.

“Go tell Bahar’s mom and dad that Bahar is now a powerless thrall for the Monster People,” Karim answered.

“Well. It’s your aunt and uncle,” I said.

“But this is all your fault, Sam,” Karim argued. “You have to do it.”

As was so often the case, I couldn’t follow Karim’s logic that any of this⁴⁸ was my fault.

“For all we know, Bahar’s probably got a lightbulb coming out of her head,” Karim said.

“She should have told them no as soon as she saw it was the Purdy House.”

And then Karim, always the devoted cousin, said, “Did you make anything for dessert? I’m kind of hungry again.”

47. Did I mention that attics in haunted houses are places where no lights are ever supposed to be turned on?

48. And by “this” I meant all the stuff that Karim and I had convinced ourselves was happening, while having no concrete proof to back up our wild assumptions.