“OLD LADY WITHERTON!” SHOUTED Gail.
“Go, child!” shouted Old Lady Witherton right back at her, pointing a gnarled, spotted, and surprisingly meaty finger toward the window, where Gail could see the top of Nancy’s head dropping out of sight. “Skedaddle already!”
Gail ran to the window and poked her head outside, to find a large wooden ladder leaning against the side of the house. Nancy was halfway down and Jerry stood at the bottom waving her on.
“It’s Old Lady Witherton!” shouted Gail, her mind refusing to accept this surprising turn of events.
“We know!” called Jerry from below. “Hurry!”
“But what’s she doing here?” asked Gail.
“Saving our butts!” answered Nancy, dropping the final few feet to the ground.
“I thought she couldn’t be bothered,” said Gail.
Suddenly the same gnarled, spotted, and surprisingly meaty fingers grabbed Gail firmly by the shoulders, shoving her through the window and out onto the ladder. “Get the lead out, girl! Evil’s a-coming!”
At Old Lady Witherton’s urging, Gail quickly climbed down and joined Jerry and Nancy at the foot of the ladder.
“Where did she come from?” she asked.
“No idea!” admitted Jerry. “She’s like a ghost!”
The ghost in question dropped to the ground beside them and quickly shooed her young charges away. “Don’t stand there dawdling,” she fired at them. “Run!”
With a sudden, horrific roar of rage coming from deep within the basement providing an extra adrenaline boost, the three terrified children and the little old lady fled from the lair of Dr. Fell faster than they had ever known themselves capable of fleeing.
Behind them, the intermittent animal-like cries were momentarily joined by angry flashes of an eerie, dim green light that seemed to seep up through the very ground itself as if struggling for freedom.
Gail, Nancy, and Jerry sat sipping hot chocolate in a brightly lit living room crammed full with puffy chairs, frilly lampshades, big dusty books, and cats. Doilies were everywhere, and there didn’t seem to be an inch of fabric in the entire room that didn’t end in some form of fancy old-lady lace.
Old Lady Witherton stood in the center of the room, arms crossed, waiting patiently for the three children to regain their senses.
Each of the children had questions. Each of the children was desperate for explanations. Each of the children sat quietly on the same couch sipping their hot chocolate and letting their eyes wander about the room.
Finally, Nancy took an unnecessarily loud sip and set her cup and saucer down on a lace coaster. “All right,” she announced. “Lay it on us, lady.”
“Nancy!” snapped Gail. “Don’t be rude.”
“I just been waiting for y’all to finish yer cocoa,” said Old Lady Witherton. “Come with me. We got a lot to talk about.”
She led the children out of the Room of the Doilies, through a very cluttered kitchen, and down a narrow corridor ending at a wooden door. Opening the door revealed a rickety wooden stairway leading down into darkness.
“Not another basement,” complained Gail.
“Oh, hush,” said Old Lady Witherton, flipping a light switch outside the door and bathing the stairs with light. “I promise there ain’t no monsters lurking down there waiting to suck out your soul. Not in my house.”
She tramped down the steps and stopped at the bottom, hitting another light switch. The children followed her down to find an ordinary, medium-sized, finished basement filled with power tools and badminton sets, beach chairs and luggage, a water heater, and a washer and dryer. In fact, had it not been for the worktable piled high with knives, swords, axes, flails, morning stars, and other assorted instruments of medieval combat, it could have been any other basement in any other home on Hardscrabble Street, Vexington Avenue, Von Burden Lane, or Turnabout Road.
“Now then,” said Old Lady Witherton, welcoming the children into her basement. “I’m sure you have questions.”
“You bet we do,” said Nancy. “Like, who are you? Why do you have all these weapons down here? How did you know we were at Dr. Fell’s? How did you know we were in danger? Why’d you come and save us?”
“What was that thing in his basement?” added Gail, joining in. “What’s Dr. Fell been doing to all the kids? Why did Dr. Fell come here? How come everybody is in love with him?”
“How come you’re not in love with him?” continued Nancy. “What does Dr. Fell want? Where did he come from? What was that creepy light down there?”
“Who is Dr. Fell?” asked Jerry.
The girls turned to look back at the youngest member of their trio.
“That, my poor little dovelings, may be the most important question of them all.” Old Lady Witherton crossed the room to the worktable and reached up to a long shelf, hanging on the wall above it. She grabbed the shelf’s lone occupant—a large, dusty, hardback book—and pulled it out.
Then she coughed from the eruption of dust that followed the book from the shelf.
“Are you all right?” asked Gail, who hoped their sudden savior was not about to hack up a lung.
After a couple more coughs, Old Lady Witherton pounded herself on the chest and turned back to face the children. “Sorry about that. I ain’t big on housekeeping down here.”
She handed the book to the children. Nancy took it, then started to drop it once Old Lady Witherton let go. Gail quickly helped her, and the two of them held the ridiculously heavy book together.
“You’ll find your answer in there,” said Old Lady Witherton.
“Which one?” asked Nancy.
“His,” responded Old Lady Witherton, jabbing a finger at Jerry, who peeked over his sister’s shoulder at the large volume.
The children looked around for a place to sit. Seeing none, and with the surface of the worktable overflowing with sharp instruments of maiming that hailed from the Middle Ages, they struggled with the weighty book and ultimately came up with a system where the two girls held the book in their arms while Jerry turned the massive pages one by one. The cover seemed to creak as it yawned wide in Gail’s arms.
“You kids are lucky I been keepin’ an eye on that house,” stated Old Lady Witherton, watching them. “When I saw you girls breakin’ in like that, I knew trouble was a-brewing.”
“What, exactly, are we looking for in here?” Gail asked, looking up from the book.
“The man’s name,” replied Old Lady Witherton. She scuttled back to the table and began inspecting the various tools of death for nicks and scratches.
“His name is Dr. Fell,” snapped Nancy irritably.
Old Lady Witherton raised her eyebrow while running her finger over the edge of an especially lethal-looking axe. “Young lady, there ain’t never been a mommy or daddy who named their baby Doctor.”
“What are you doing?” asked Jerry.
“Gonna need me some fightin’ tools,” answered Old Lady Witherton. “Y’all keep flipping pages. You’ll find it.”
Returning their attention to the book, the children widened their eyes in amazement as Jerry turned one heavy, thick page after another, venturing deeper into the mysteries of the book. Every page was covered with tiny, handwritten notes jotted down between pencil-drawn images of hideous-looking people and creatures pulled from humanity’s worst nightmares. Interspersed were pictures of a tall man in black with a purple top hat, usually wearing something gold somewhere on his body.
“Old Lady Witherton—” began Gail.
“Constance, honey,” interrupted Old Lady Witherton as she set down the axe and picked up a wicked-looking spiked ball dangling from the end of a chain. “My name is Constance.”
“OK. Constance,” continued Gail, “what is this book?”
“A history of the crimes and horrors done to the people of the world by Dr. Fell,” answered Old Lady Witherton.
She punctuated her statement by swinging the chain over her head and smashing the spiked ball into the wall in front of her. The three children jumped and screamed, dropping the book.
“Oh, sorry there, little lump-muffins. Didn’t mean to startle you. Just making sure everything’s in working order for my assault.”
The three children silently agreed to ignore that last remark and instead bent down to pick up the book. They froze, however, because the fall had jostled the right number of pages over, to reveal the very thing for which they searched. The name of Dr. Fell.
After a moment, they stood up straight, bewildered. Finally, Gail voiced what they were all thinking.
“Faustus Felonious Fell?”
“The one and only,” said Old Lady Witherton, straining to pull the string tight on a crossbow she was holding.
“Should that name mean something?” asked Nancy.
“His…name…,” grunted Old Lady Witherton as she pulled and stretched and finally snapped the string into place. “Whew! Either that string has gone and shrunk or I really am getting old. Where was I? Oh, yes. His name means everything. It’s who he is. It’s what he is. And it’s a warning. Faustus Felonious Fell is a bad, bad man.”
“We already knew that,” argued Nancy.
“But do you have any idea how long he’s been a bad, bad man?” challenged Old Lady Witherton, absently swinging the crossbow in their direction. The children dropped to the ground to get out of the line of fire. “What if I told you that Dr. Fell…that evil, evil man…is well over five hundred years old?”
She was met with blank stares of disbelief from her squatting audience. Jerry looked at his sister to confirm that she’d heard the same number he had. Gail, in turn, looked at Nancy for similar confirmation.
“Five hundred?” asked Nancy for all three of them.
“At least,” said Old Lady Witherton, setting the crossbow back on the table, much to the relief of the children. “I’ve found written mention of him as far back as 1512, but there are oral histories goin’ back even further.”
“But…how is that even possible?” asked Gail, standing back up.
“Oh my sweet, dear little dovelings. Ain’t you figured out yet what it is he does?”
The children stared at her, either not understanding or, in Jerry’s case, not wanting to believe.
“He steals your time,” said Old Lady Witherton sadly, answering her own question.
Gail, Nancy, and Jerry shared a look of confused fear, causing Lady Witherton to sigh, swipe her arm across the worktable to clear a space, and sit down on the edge.
“I suppose it’s story time,” she whispered, staring down at the floor. “Gather round, my little dovelings.”