No one among us had ever expected the things that would happen that night at the Purdy House.
Throughout the dinner, Boris sat with his lower lip poked out and his arms crossed tightly, staring at his meal as though lasers were about to fire from his eyes and vaporize the entire table.
Beth Blank said, “This is the best meal I’ve had in ages!”
I felt myself blushing. Brenden and I stood quietly by the entrance to the kitchen like some kind of dinner sentries. It would have been unforgivable for either of us to actually eat in front of the clients.
And at some point, Beth Blank turned to Bahar with a serious look on her face and said, “Boris likes to play tricks on babysitters. Just so you know, he is not allowed to take baths in milk or Mountain Dew, cottage cheese, or canned pork-and-beans.”
He’s taken baths in cottage cheese and canned pork-and-beans? I thought.
“Knowing this will make things a lot easier,” Bahar said.
That would be a lot of cans of beans to open too.
So Timmy and Beth Blank thanked me and Brenden one more time after dinner, which Boris sat through but did not eat, and then they left to go into Blue Creek while Brenden and I cleaned up. But a few times during the meal, Beth Blank made excuses for Boris’s eccentric71 behavior: “Don’t feel bad about Boris, Sam. He’s a very fussy eater. Most nights, I’ll wake up at two or three in the morning only to hear him rummaging around in the house, looking for food.”
I bet you do, I thought.
“Boris is a secret eater,” Timmy Blank said, and when he said “secret eater,” he winked at me.
I wondered how many secrets Boris had eaten in his little six-year-old life.
So it was just when Brenden and I had finished packing things up to haul back home (where Karim was still hiding and pouting, probably) that Bahar called out to us from somewhere in the maze of rooms inside the Purdy House.
“Sam? Brenden? I can’t find Boris, and there are bats coming out of the fireplace!”
Brenden looked at me, eyes wide, with an expression that almost asked if maybe the Purdy House was like a sanctuary for wandering vampires, which, if it was, that part of the story had never been reported in the Hill Country Yodeler.
Brenden and I went out into the living room, but it was already getting too dark to see.
“This is creepy,” Brenden whispered.
“I’ll turn on the raccoon,” I said.
And that was when the first very strange thing happened—or seemed to happen.72
I found a little switch on the electrical cord coming out of the raccoon73 that turned on the bulb poking through the sailor’s cap, and out of the poor, bald-legged creature’s skull, and when the light came on, I noticed that the raccoon seemed to be standing in a different position, with his arms crossed in front of his little chest,74 and the raccoon’s tiny wire-framed glasses were now missing.
And when the light came on, I also saw something that was engraved on a small brass plate on the wooden base beneath the raccoon’s hind legs that said this:
ISHMAEL (1885–1891)
BELOVED PET AND COMPANION
No wonder Ishmael’s leg was bald—he was almost one hundred fifty years old.
Also, something struck me as odd and familiar about the raccoon’s name, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was.
Bahar stood near the fireplace and the wild pig in the hiking hat, who also seemed to have been strangely repositioned into a running pose. And the bear head above the mantel was different too. Its former “jazz hands” had been transformed into two enthusiastic bear thumbs-up, as though he were sincerely approving of our performance. Bahar held on to the little ash broom from the fireplace set, and waved it toward the ceiling, where—yes—two bats were flying around and around, making absolutely no sound at all outside the occasional thumps and thuds produced by fluttering into the walls.
“We need to open some windows!” Brenden said, but the first one he tried—the one behind the sofa where the mother skunk had been parading her stuffed babies, who all seemed to have magically migrated to the opposite side of the room—would not move an inch.
“It’s stuck,” he said.
The bats kept circling wildly, battering themselves against the walls as Bahar tried to sweep them away.
Brenden tried another window, but like the first one, it wouldn’t budge. In fact, none of the windows in the entire downstairs of the Purdy House was functional.
Thump! Thump! went the bats.
“Hey! The koala bear is different!” Bahar said.
Sure enough, the koala bear (the one that had been posed in a fistfight with the snapping turtle) had moved. The snapping turtle was now turned onto its back, and the koala was straddling the underside of its shell, one little koala hand grasping the turtle’s neck and the other clenched in a fist, about to punch the turtle square in the face.
And the snapping turtle had an expression that seemed to say, Did I say something wrong?
I guess koala bears and snapping turtles just naturally hate each other.
At least I had finally found something here in Blue Creek that I was not going to mind saying good-bye to at all: the Purdy House.
“Try opening the front door,” I said to Brenden as the bats continued to circle and thud, circle and thud.
I suppose we all started to panic when Brenden announced that the front door was stuck shut. Well, when I say “we all,” I pretty much mean me and Brenden.
Bahar never panicked about anything.
But we were trapped inside the Purdy House, just like my dad, Linda Swineshead, and his friend Oscar Padilla had been trapped there all those years before. And to make matters worse, Boris was hiding or missing, and just when Brenden had told us that the door to the outside and the usually sane part of Blue Creek was hopelessly jammed, we’d heard the faintest sound like singing coming up through the air from somewhere far below our feet.
We all froze, held our breath, and listened. It sounded like a chorus of voices, but a hundred miles away. We couldn’t make out what exactly was being sung to us, and the bats continued their tireless crashing into the walls, which was actually louder than the music.
Brenden and I both screamed when something said, “I’m up in the attic!” even though the something that said it was up in the attic happened to be a six-year-old boy named Boris Blank. Still, just the thought of being inside that horrible Purdy House with all those stuffed dead animals that seemed to move by themselves, bats coming out of the fireplace, music from belowground, and all the doors and windows sealed tight was almost too much to handle.
Bahar seemed unfazed. She held on to the brass fireplace broom and shouted up the stairway, “Boris, come downstairs now!”
“I want to play hide-and-seek,” called Boris’s ghostly voice from somewhere above (while the singing and bat-thumping continued). “You’re supposed to find me, in case you were wondering what kinds of things real babysitters do!”
Bahar lowered her ash broom and marched through the foyer toward the staircase.
She said to me, “Remind me to never babysit for Boris Blank, ever again.”
“I think I could do that,” I said.
Brenden rattled the doorknob again, but nothing happened.
And after about five seconds beneath the swirling bats, standing in the middle of all those eyes and the animals that had mysteriously changed positions, I decided I’d rather be upstairs in the attic with Bahar than trapped down here with Brenden and the singing, and all of the Blanks’ extremely creepy babies.
As I climbed the stairs, I never stopped for a second to consider that attics are always the creepiest part of any creepy house.
71. Sometimes people use words like “eccentric” because it’s nicer than saying “annoying” or “repulsive.”
72. To be honest, it wasn’t the first, but it was one of those Purdy House–type things that nobody was expecting.
73. In a place where you wouldn’t ever want an electrical cord coming out of.
74. The same way Boris had been sitting during dinner.