The next day, Stimply rang on the phone on a table outside the tiki bar, almost as if he knew Jonathan was nearby, sorting through a bizarre collection of ceramic frogs and toads that included a tableau that appeared to be a reenactment of the battle of Waterloo.
“Hallo, Jonathan!”
Stimply, accompanied by a crackling sound like tinfoil or crab legs breaking or insect wings unfolding, captured by a microphone.
“What’s that sound?” Jonathan asked.
“I’m molting. It’s molting season.”
“What?”
“I’m joking. It’s joking season. Now, why did you call me?”
“You called me. You called me. It’s always you calling me.”
“Ah, yes, old chap! You’ve got the right of it, my dear boy.”
If he didn’t think it unlikely, Jonathan would have sworn Stimply was giddy in the way drunk people get before the evening has worn on to the point of oblivion. And that his accent had changed.
“Listen, Stimply, have you heard of something called the Black Bauble?” Another task in Dr. Lambshead’s letter.
“Don’t say that name!” Stimply hissed. “Don’t say it!”
“Why not?” Jonathan asked. And then because he was still irritated with Stimply from before: “Black Bauble! Black Bauble! Black Bauble!”
The line went dead.
Jonathan sighed. Yes, that had been childish, but then he had the excuse of not yet really being an adult, even if he’d been expected by his mom to act like one most of his life.
Besides, who didn’t like saying “Black Bauble” over and over.
The telephone rang again.
“Hello, Stimply,” Jonathan said. A guess, but a sound one.
“Wobble,” Stimply said. “Call it a Wobble. Please call it a Wobble.”
“I’m about to call you a Wobble,” Jonathan wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he said, “Apologies. If you like, I will call it a Wobble from now on.”
The sounds behind Stimply of frantic … knitting? … and the clatter of what sounded like sewing machines set to maximum overdrive drowned out his chittering.
“Good, Jonathan, good. Mark my words, Wobble will be much, much better. But, in any event, I’m calling because I must report a bit of a crisis.”
“Does your crisis involve a marmot and a strange woman?”
“Why, Jonathan, I do believe you have the most delightful sense of humor. No, I’m afraid it’s about the estate, which has rather been run into the ground of late.”
Exasperated, Jonathan said, “Haven’t you been the one running the estate?”
“Looks that way, lad. Looks that way.” This said in a conspiratorial mutter in no way appropriate to the context.
When Jonathan said nothing, Stimply continued, as the sewing machines abated. “I’m afraid that we have only the summer until some fateful decisions await. Your cataloging must be followed by an auction, and we must hope for some kindness from various banks, as well.”
Great. So now he was on a sinking ship full of junk that he had to somehow rescue. He didn’t bother raking Stimply over the coals as to why he hadn’t said anything before, for a terrifying thought occurred.
“And what about Poxforth? Is my future there secure?”
“Ah, yes—Poxforth Academy isn’t going anywhere.”
“What? I mean, my tuition, room and board. Is it—?”
“Paid in full for the duration? No, I’m afraid not. You could conceivably commute to Porthfox—I mean, Poxforth—for the summer term and most of that would be paid up, but going into the fall … a bit iffy, I fear. I’ll look at things again, but it may not be possible.”
Jonathan just stared at the receiver in shock. It was one thing to leave of his own accord, but it had never occurred to him he would be forced to leave Poxforth. Perversely, the possibility had him remembering all the things he liked about the place.
“Jonathan? Jonathan? Are you still there?”
But Jonathan had had enough of Stimply. He smashed the receiver down.
Although it had remained mum before, this phone, like its pantry cousin, now proved to be either less or more than ordinary, depending on your perspective. A secret compartment opened and a message popped out: All that glitters is not gold. All that dulls is not mud.
Really?
Also rounding the corner was Rack, in the wheelchair, possibly for dramatic effect—smashing his way with glee through a latticework of inextricably confused trellises. He was almost always nearby, and Jonathan believed this was because Rack sensed what Jonathan sensed—that the basement, for all its hoarder whimsy, was not a place in which you would like to find yourself alone.
Apparently, he’d heard none of Jonathan’s exasperating telephone call, because he launched right in with a question.
“Why is there a portrait of a huge fat squirrel on the wall in the study upstairs?”
“How should I know?” Jonathan replied, perhaps more abruptly than he’d meant. “But it’s a marmot, not a squirrel. Maybe even the marmot I saw on the lawn. Groundhog. Whistle-pig. Not squirrel. Not a damn squirrel.”
“My apologies, my friend. I did not mean to offend. I did not know you and the marmot were engaged to be married,” Rack said.
Danny chose that moment to relay some important news of her own, from around at least a couple of corners.
“I’ve found Dracula’s testicles!” she said.
“Finally!” Rack shouted back.
“Dracula did not exist,” Jonathan said.
“Sure he did!” Danny said cheerily.
“On the level, Danny—what do you mean?” Jonathan asked.
“I’ve found a jar labeled Dracula’s testicles!”
“What’s in it?” Rack shouted, as his wheels crunched joyous over some bubble wrap.
“A couple of old balls, it looks to be,” Danny stated with a laugh as she came into view holding a small liquid-filled laboratory jar.
He needed the Rack and the Danny that made him feel like they knew more than he did, could rescue him if he got lost. These two clowning-around-town types he wasn’t as sure about.
Jonathan sighed. “How long did you say you could stay?”
“Forever, mate!” Rack and Danny shouted back.
“And, no, really, it’s labeled ‘Dracula’s Testicles.’ Whatever it is,” Danny said, faux hurt that he didn’t believe her.
“Not as glam as a Black Bauble, right, Jonathan?” Rack said.
Which meant he had heard his row with Stimply after all. Great.
“Wobble,” he said weakly. “Call it a Wobble.”
The enthusiasm of Rack and Danny, how they’d so swiftly become hardcore catalogers of his grandfather’s mess, worried at Jonathan, created a twinge of guilt, for his mood had soured the longer he had poked around in the mess bequeathed to him.
Danny’s relentless forward motion, like that of a friendly shark, counterpoint to Rack’s snark, felt earnest and sincere in a way that his withholding of vital information did not.
Even as Jonathan felt more than a twinge when he noted how Rack took longer and longer breaks, would hazard a wince and a quick sit-down when he thought Jonathan wasn’t looking. Some instinct pulled at him—to simply fire R & D, send them packing in a gentle or joking manner, and avoid the question of telling them more. He need never tell them more and thus spare them the many, many mysteries he had already encountered, the solutions to which might turn dark indeed.
Tee the Rat had not helped Jonathan’s mood, intrepidly clinging to Danny’s shoulder as she bounced up and down off the ladder seeking this or that potential treasure deep on the shelves and stacks. Even the rat was implicated now, all-in. Not only that, but when ordinary rats appeared, Jonathan would now feel uncomfortable with any but the mildest of relocations. “Hurt any rat anywhere, Jonathan, and I will feel the pain,” Tee’s look told him, as if doubting Jonathan’s pledge to never knowingly hurt any animal. Except, perhaps, fish or chicken for dinner. Yet even in the midst of the tumult of cleaning and sorting, the rat stared at him as if Tee were aboard a lurching ship in a storm and Jonathan were a lighthouse.
All of which explained why that night, after an early dinner in the parlor, Jonathan begged off playing card games, citing fatigue, and went off by himself back down into the basement. He’d given over his birdhouse bedroom to Tee-Tee and Danny, who thought it was hilarious and “good value,” and Rack had staked a claim to a guest bedroom on the first floor.
“Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Rack had said as his good night.
“See you later, alligator,” Danny added, while Jonathan rolled his eyes. She was obsessed with alligators lately, kept wanting Jonathan to tell stories of jumping over them on his Florida rambles.
Jonathan had his sights on more than a normal bedroom. What he needed right now was space in a mind rapidly filling up with things, an escape from this huge piñata full of antiques and oddments that had exploded all over the basement. What he needed was some humid sunlight and black water populated by reassuring snakes and snapping turtles. Although in a way the basement was like a swamp or marsh, too. You could get lost here. You could get lost and never find your way out ever again. And who knows what sort of creatures you might have to jump over?
The large tiki bar intrigued him in this regard, a space indoors that was also outdoors in a sense with its bamboo cladding and ridiculous palm thatch roof. It belonged poolside in some suburban backyard or in someone’s basement den.
Upon the bamboo had been scratched what Jonathan took to be more advice from the good doctor: “Beware the Wobble,” “Take care with squishy, if squishy you encounter; usually mean you a mischief,” “Always stopper the booze, my friend, or the fruit flies will make you regret it.”
He approached the interior tentatively, afraid of some new trap, perhaps even another door. One that this time led to a land of talking animals that for no good reason celebrated trading a witchy dictatorship for a monarchy? Instead he found the usual: a bar top, with stacks of old liquor bottles and a mirrored glass wall with wood panel highlights.
The doorway past the bar led into a large space in the back of the structure, no doubt meant for supplies. But someone had repurposed it already as sleeping quarters. Dr. Lambshead?
He recalled a grainy old video of a group of foraging capybaras in the pampas of Argentina, from which after several seconds Dr. Lambshead had risen like a peculiar haunting. It was a hilarious and yet somehow unsurprising clip. The way the capybaras had ignored him. The unassuming way he’d risen from among them as if from deep sleep. The man had camped in the open quite a bit. Perhaps at times the mansion had proved too claustrophobic for him as well.
Inside the sleeping nook, he found a makeshift mantel for a small lamp and an old wind-up alarm clock, and a dilapidated clothes chest, and even a couple of old woolen blankets that Jonathan tossed out into the general clutter. He’d brought his own sleeping bag.
Someone had painted a night sky on the ceiling beams, which just made him think it more likely Dr. Lambshead had slept there. Although, the more he looked at that expanse of the heavens the less sure he could be it was mirrored in the sky outside.
Lines from a poem by Thomas Hardy came back to him, courtesy of a bizarre commencement address by Sir Waddel Ponder, the headmaster of Poxforth:
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
He disliked the poem’s colonial sentiment, but prized the cosmic expanse that opened up within it.
Was he destined now to live under strange-eyed constellations? Alone? Because it was impossible to tell any of his few friends what was really going on.
It would be easy to return to the doors, the haunted mansion, but also dangerous. He knew no more from a day exploring the basement than he’d known last night. But the woman he’d met by the pond knew what was going on—he was almost sure of it. And he was also sure that she wasn’t finished with Dr. Lambshead’s mansion.
Jonathan wasn’t just bivouacking because it felt more comfortable to him. If someone still lurked about the basement, the tiki bar was a great place from which to catch them in the act. It was the spot Sarah would’ve chosen, he knew.
Especially as someone, presumably Dr. Lambshead, had already bored a hole in the wall next to his sleeping spot. Along with the doorway and window slit, he had clear lines of sight back to the glorified birdbath, the mouth of the corridor, and right into the heart of the bramble of objects.
Jonathan shivered.
Perhaps Dr. Lambshead had chosen it for the same reason.
Sentinel post. Refuge. Trap.