When Stephanie put her hand on the doorknob to the library and prepared to enter it for a second time that Friday evening, several hours had passed since she had essentially destroyed the room.
During the family dinner, Grandpa Drummond had called her ‘his little snickerdoodle’ and chucked her chin. And right after dinner he had fed her ice cream, but none of that made Stephanie forget that she had promised to get a bedtime book for Aunt Helen from Grandpa Drummond’s library.
She was almost afraid to go back inside after the mess she knew she had made. When the door swung open, she saw the room was dark, and in the murky light emanating from the early moon, Stephanie noticed that some of the edges of the windowpanes outside were thick with dirt and messy spider webs. She crept across the carpet keeping an eye out for the lion’s glass eye; she sure wished she had gotten that thing after all the trouble she’d gone through.
There was the hole in the wall where the elk head had fallen and a pile of dirt on the carpet near the baseboard. There was the grim elk head itself staring fixedly at the dark ceiling. Stephanie glanced at the lion. Without the lights on, you could barely see that it was missing an eye. Stephanie felt nervous and guilty. The room was creepy enough without having the damaged heads despising her.
During the prior Christmas, as she had mentioned to Aunt Helen, Stephanie had made an eager search through her grandparents’ bookshelves. In one far corner of the room, where she headed now, she remembered, one shelf which looked as though a team of bobcats had been brought in and set to the task of shredding the covers of black and red velvet annuals and albums. The old tomes with titles like Benson Beauties and Copper State Capers promised hours of harmless escapades, if you could get past the spidery strings tickling your forearms and calves. There were foxy and dog-eared war documents from the files of old Fort Critterdon stripped naked of their covers (what depredations they had endured!) and stacks of broken and beaten book covers which had collapsed without their pages. And on one momentous afternoon she found a book which was wonderful. It concerned a murder! She would get that book to read to Aunt Helen.
And it was there still on the same shelf. Blood on the Apache Moon: Terror Tales of Olden Arizona. That was the medicine for her aunt before bed. That would be bound to do her a great deal of good.
As she left the library with the wonderful terror tales book tucked under her arm, she got an image in her mind of a certain funny mask with all sorts of hair on it, a long, black, scraggly beard and a huge nose. It was some dumb Mexican thing that Grandpa liked, and she had touched the wiry beard once. She would like to see how that hair was attached. Or, more truthfully, she would like to pull some of that hair out by clumps and throw the handfuls into the fountain with the big goldfish swimming in it. A glob of beard hair floating on the pond surface would be really funny if somebody thought it was an animal and maybe some of the fish would bite the hair and she could yank them out of the water tomorrow. She would like to get a hold of one of those incredibly fat goldfishes. But she thought of something that was even better. Something that almost made her shiver it was so amazing.
If she wore the mask, it might surprise Aunt Helen right before the terror tales!
She found the mask on a narrow table in the living room. She snatched it off the table and put it on.
Down the hall toward the staircase, Stephanie crept with the mask on her face. Boy, this would give Aunt Helen a jolt that would bring her into reality, if nothing else did, and afterwards she would be able to paint her modern cloud pictures.
As she put her foot on the bottom stair, another funny idea popped into her head. She recalled where she had stashed Grandpa Drummond’s razor. Right before dinner, when she came in with Aunt Helen, she had discovered Grandpa Drummond had left his bathroom door ajar. It was easy to get the shaver, but she hadn’t had time to shave the lion before dinner was announced. She had dropped the electric razor into that big basket in the library and it was still there. This mask face needed to see a barber. He, he!
Stephanie ran back into the dark, scary library. With the mask on, it was a little difficult to see into the bottom of the large basket, but she finally felt around until she touched the shaver. She could see herself buzzing the shaver over the mask beard and maybe the lion’s chin.
Stephanie switched the shaver on. It buzzed loudly and vibrated in her hand.
But who was coming?
Just before the footsteps reached the library, Stephanie switched off the razor and found she could hide behind the enormous basket. She still had the mask on her face.