“Uh-huh.”
“I kind of lit his garden on fire last year,” Dill explained.
“WHAT?”
“It was an accident! I was trying to scare something out of there. Didn’t work so good.”
A thrill of fear gripped Peter’s chest. “Scare what out?”
Dill looked to the right and the left, as though he were afraid of who might be listening.
“There’s something weird going on in his garden at night,” Dill whispered. “Especially the watermelon patch. That’s what I lit on fire. Well, first I lit the corn, but the watermelon patch was right next to it. You ever seen a watermelon explode?”
“No.”
“It’s coooool.” Dill grinned, eyes wide. Then he stopped grinning. “But it’s reeeeaaaally messy. And LOUD. You can’t exactly hide watermelons exploding.”
“What were you trying to scare out?”
“I don’t know, exactly…but I can show you tonight.”
What in the world was Dill talking about? A stray dog? A bear? His voice was way too spooky and low for it to be some normal kind of animal.
Peter hesitated, then relented. “Okay, I – ”
“BOY!” boomed an old man’s voice.
Peter swung around to see Grandfather striding towards him.
“Oh CRAP,” Dill hissed, and shrunk down behind the fence. “Look, meet me out here at ten o’clock tonight, okay?”
“But what – ”
“I gotta go, man, I gotta GO!”
Dill scampered off across his yard and raced inside the one-story house. The screen door slammed shut behind him.
Grandfather stomped up to the fence and switched his glare from Dill’s house to Peter’s face.
“I don’t want to see you having anything to do with that idjit, you hear me?”
Peter backed up a foot.
“H-he seems okay…”
“He’s a ruffian and a scoundrel and a troublemaker. You hear me, boy?” he thundered at Dill’s house. “I haven’t forgotten those watermelons, you little mongrel!”
From somewhere in Dill’s house came a man’s voice, sleepy and irritated. “Shut up, old man!”
“He’s a fool, a scamp, a rapscallion!” Grandfather railed at the unseen voice. “With parents to match!”
“Shuuuuuut UP!” the man’s voice roared.
Peter blushed a deep red and put his head in his hands.
Oh my God, Dill was right…he is crazy.
“In the house with you!” Grandfather snarled. “Git!”
Peter walked to the front door with the old man’s claw clamped down on his shoulder. All the way there, he wondered what awful thing he’d done for God to make him move in with an insane person.
4
If the house was crazy outside, it was double crazy inside. Maybe triple crazy.
The main hallway was three stories high. A giant wooden staircase angled up to the left until it reached the second floor, then sloped up to the right until it reached the third. Peter could imagine Dill having tons of fun sliding down the banister from the top floor all the way to the bottom – if the railing had curved around instead of jutting out at sharp angles. Peter pictured Dill tumbling off into space at the first hairpin turn and shuddered.
To the left there was a living room with antique furniture and stained glass lamps. A giant Arabic rug covered the polished hardwood floor, and a coffee table with a glass plate in the middle sat in the center of the room.
On the right side of the hallway was a cavernous dining hall with a table that looked like it could have served 30 people or more.
Under the stairwell was a door with an ancient lock, the kind in old movies that opened with skeleton keys. Peter gave it a glance and was about to walk on when his Grandfather clamped a hand on his shoulder again.
“We have some rules around here, boy. Number one is you are to NEVER ENTER THAT DOOR.”
Peter looked at it with new interest.
“You are never to try to open that door, you are never to play with that door, you are never to TOUCH that door. ON PAIN OF DEATH. Do I make myself clear?”
Peter stepped back. “Why?”
“And you are never to ASK ABOUT THAT DOOR.”
Peter looked from his Grandfather to the door and back again.
“Very well, moving on,” Grandfather muttered and started up the stairs. Peter followed.
“There are many, many rooms in this house,” Grandfather growled. “If a door is shut, DON’T OPEN IT. If a door is locked, DON’T BOTHER IT. There are plenty of open rooms for you to go in and destroy, which I know you will.”
They reached the second story. The hall stretched off a very long way in either direction, longer than Peter would have thought possible.
“Are we going down there to – ”
“No.”
Grandfather continued up the stairs.
As he reached the third story, Peter looked down at the hardwood floor thirty feet below. He got a little dizzy. Actually he got really dizzy, and had to look away until he was off the stairs and safely on the third floor.
Grandfather pointed to an open doorway as he walked by. “That is your mother’s.”
Peter peered in on a windowless room with a large canopy bed and paintings of bowls of fruit.
“Next to it is your sister’s.”
That room was windowless, too, and nothing Beth would want. The walls were dark purple, the furniture was straight out of George Washington’s time, and the only painting on the wall was of three women in white robes knitting a long piece of cloth. One of them held golden scissors over the thread, waiting to cut it.
Grandfather wasn’t so good with little girls, Peter was guessing.
“And this is yours.”
Whoa.
It was almost as big as his mother’s, with a large bed along the center wall and a writing desk and lamp in the corner. But the main thing was the giant window across the room, which poured sunlight onto the floor. Even better was a perch in front of the window, a pillow-lined ledge set two feet into the wall, perfect for sitting and watching on a rainy day.
Peter hopped up on it and looked outside. Beyond the glass panes were the branches of an enormous tree, just right for climbing. Peter had never snuck out in his life, but that tree was the perfect way to do it.
Not that he had the faintest inclination to try. In fact, when he looked at the ground over thirty feet below, he got woozy even thinking about it – just like on the stairwell – and had to look away again.
The view was amazing. Behind the house, a vast field stretched for a quarter mile until it just ended, as though it dropped off into the light blue sky.
There was Dill’s house off to the right, completely visible from front to back. The roof was missing shingles here and there, and generally looked as rundown from above as it did from the ground level, but the place had a backyard as big as a soccer field – and with next to nothing in it. A rusty metal swing set and concrete patio kept the weeds company before the overgrown grass gave way to miles and miles of forest.
Separating Grandfather’s property from the tiny house was the rickety fence where Peter had met Dill just moments before. Its sagging rails and leaning posts stretched down the meadow for hundreds of yards, then finally collapsed in a jumble of rotting logs beneath the overhanging tree branches.
Back in Grandfather’s yard, an untrimmed barrier of rose bushes lined the rear of the house. Even from this height, Peter could see the different colored blooms: red, pink, yellow, white, and a dozen variations.
Funny, Grandfather didn’t seem like the kind of guy to grow roses.
“I’m surprised Mom didn’t want this room for herself,” Peter mused.
“Everyone gets the rooms I assign them.”
“Why’d you give me the one with the window?”
“In case anything ever came through it, I figured you’d handle it best.”
Peter stared at his grandfather for
a hint of a smile, any indication of a joke. There was none.
Okaaaaay…
Peter turned back to the window.
A hundred feet beyond the roses was what he guessed to be the garden Dill had mentioned. It was surprisingly large, almost as big as a football field, but overgrown and wild-looking, with a forest of green corn stalks standing guard over twisted mounds of vines. Here and there were bright green specks that could have been watermelons, he supposed.
“I guess the garden grew back,” Peter commented absentmindedly. Only after the words were out did he realize maybe that wasn’t the best subject to bring up.
“What did that little vandal tell you?” Grandfather snapped.
“Uhhhhh, he said there was an accident. But it looks like everything’s fine now,” Peter added with forced cheerfulness.
“Stay out of that garden, boy,” Grandfather commanded.
What a relief. Unhappy visions of himself toiling and sweating in the midday sun, picking peas and cucumbers, completely disappeared.
“Are you the only one who works out there?” Peter asked warily.
“No one works out there. It’s not our garden. Stay out of it.”
Peter looked back in confusion. Beyond the garden, the vast meadow was empty except for a jumble of stones that looked tiny in the distance.
“Is it Dill’s family’s?”
“It’s no one’s. Leave it alone, and DON’T GO INTO THAT GARDEN. And don’t go down to the ocean, either.”
“What?!” Peter gasped. “That’s the ocean down there?”
“At the edge of the meadow is a giant cliff,” Grandfather warned, “with a hundred foot drop to the rocks below. Stay away. And don’t get within ten feet of that blasted garden, do you hear me?”
Grandfather stomped out of the room.
Peter looked back out the window and down at the garden.
If it didn’t belong to anyone…then who had replanted it after Dill burned it down?
5
They spent an hour dragging in all their suitcases and boxes from the Honda up to the third floor. Grandfather untied Peter’s bike from the roof of the car and stowed it away in an old, wooden garage back behind the house. Peter looked around inside at the ancient Ford truck, the dust-covered tools on the walls, and the stacks of bug-eaten newspapers lying everywhere until Grandfather chased him out.
After that, the old man disappeared down a hallway on the first floor and Mom went to fix something to eat.
Dinner was not in the giant room Peter had seen by the main hall but at a cozy little table in the kitchen, which ran along the back of the house. Unfortunately, the food wasn’t very good: canned peas, canned sauerkraut, canned beets. Beth was having fun, though, smashing everything flat like pancakes and then licking it off her palms. Grandfather was nowhere to be seen.
Mom watched him scrape at his plate. “I’ll get better food tomorrow, Pete, when I go into town. It’s all I could find in the pantry.”
“Why isn’t he here to eat this stuff?” Peter grumbled.
Mom sighed. “That’s just Grandfather. He’s probably in his study, reading away.”
“Mom, this place is weird.”
She smiled sadly. “Yeah, I know. I’d forgotten a lot.”
“What’s in all the locked rooms?”
Shrug. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You lived here all your life and you don’t know?”
“One thing you’ll find out, Peter, is that when your grandfather tells you not to do something, it’s best if you don’t even think about doing it.” She turned to Beth and forced a spoon into her fingers. “Honey, don’t eat with your hands.”
“What about the garden?”
Mom’s eyes got big. She acted scared but broke into a smile as she talked. “Ohhhh, don’t go in the garden! Whatever you do, don’t go in the garden.”
She stared off into the distance. “I think I was…five or six, maybe, and I went and picked some tomatoes for my mom? Put ‘em in my dress and held it out like this.”
Even though she was wearing jeans, Mom pantomimed holding out a dress by the corners to form a basket of sorts.
“When I brought the tomatoes in, my dad – Grandfather – he got so mad, he spanked me till I couldn’t sit down for hours. I cried and I cried…”
Mom snapped out of the daydream. Her face grew slightly angry, and she stabbed at her beets with a fork. “And I never went in that garden again.”
“Why aren’t we supposed to go in the garden?”
“I don’t know, Peter. Your grandfather said it doesn’t belong to us. He said not to go past the rose bushes, because none of it belongs to us, and they might think we’re trespassing.”
“Well, who does it belong to?”
Mom’s face clouded over a bit. “I’m not sure, but I think there’s a bunch of hobos who eat the food.”
“Hobos?”
Mom caught herself and smiled. “Homeless people, honey. I’m sorry, hobo isn’t the accepted word these days. But ‘hobo’ was what we called them back then…they used to ride the trains all around the country and live on the really poor side of life. I think Grandfather kept the garden for them, I’m not sure.”
“Did you see the hobos?”
Mom cocked her head, as though trying to remember. “Only once…it was night, and I saw somebody…or something in the garden. I didn’t go find out what it was because I was scared. But there’s no need to worry, I lived here eighteen years until I left for college and nobody ever bothered us. Hobos are harmless, kid. Just don’t go in the garden, and don’t make any problems with Grandfather, okay?”
Peter nodded. “Okay, Mom,” and he meant it.
Whatever it took to avoid Grandfather’s anger, that’s what Peter was going to do.
6
Mom finished putting Beth to bed at 8:30. After that, she and Peter read in the den. Read, because there was no TV.
“He doesn’t have a TV?!”
“Don’t make a fuss, Peter. Once I find a job maybe I can talk him into letting me buy one.”
Peter grumbled as he looked around the room for something to read.
All he could find was a wicker basket full of National Geographics. But not anything recent – in fact, not a single one had pictures. They were all from the 1940’s and just full of writing.
Peter groaned and went upstairs to get some comic books of his own. After he returned, they both read quietly until Grandfather lumbered in.
“Time for bed,” he announced as he pointed at Peter.
Peter glanced at the huge wooden clock on the fireplace mantel: 9:45. He was supposed to meet Dill at 10 o’clock.
“But – ”
“Time for bed!” Grandfather repeated angrily.
“Dad…” Mom sighed. “Peter’s used to going to bed a little later than this – ”
“I’ll not be questioned in my own house, Melissa,” Grandfather warned.
Mom stared at Grandfather. He stared back.
“Go get ready for bed, Peter,” she said in a dull, flat voice.
“But Mom – ”
“Peter, just do it.”
Jeez.
Peter trudged up the stairs. He could hear angry muttering and whispering back in the den, but he couldn’t make any of it out.
There was a bathroom next to his bedroom. As he brushed his teeth he mentally tallied all the reasons he hated moving here from California.
Boring…stupid…all my friends are gone…a psycho for a grandfather…who hates the one kid who lives anywhere near me…NO TV…gotta go to bed like a three year-old…can’t even walk out in the flippin’ back yard…can’t even go to the ocean…
He pulled off his clothes and climbed into bed under the musty sheets. It smelled like old people.
Peter fluffed his pillow and coughed. He was glad the lights were off; he didn’t want to see the dust that was probably in the air.
Gross.
The one
good thing was that he had a perfect view out the window. Lying there in the dark room, he watched the sliver of a moon far over the trees and wished he could be in California right now, under a California sky.
Where it’s two weeks away till school, he added angrily to his list.
And now Dill is going to hate me, he thought. He’ll think I stood him up for sure. The one friend I could’ve made is going to totally –
“Yo, dude,” somebody whispered outside his window.
Peter bolted upright, his heart thudding in his chest.
“Dill?” he whispered back.
There was a familiar buzzcut silhouette perched right outside the window. It waved.
Peter jumped out of bed and climbed up on the cushioned ledge. Sure enough, there was Dill, seated precariously on the windowsill outside.
Peter searched around for a second, found and unlatched a lock on the left side of the glass panes, and pulled. The window swung open towards him like a door.
“How’d you get up here?” Peter asked, amazed.
“The tree, man. I can climb like a monkey. Hoo hoo, haw haw!” Dill scratched his underarms and poked out his lips like a chimpanzee.
“Sorry I can’t come. They made me go to bed,” Peter said morosely.
“I figured when I saw the lights go on in this room and then go out. Lucky thing you’re by the tree, I didn’t wanna have to go far on this roof. Well, come on, get dressed and let’s go.”
Peter looked at him, dumbfounded. “Go?”
“Yeah, let’s boogie.”
“I can’t leave! I’m supposed to be in bed!”
Dill groaned. “Don’t tell me you’re a teacher’s pet.”
“No…”
“You’re probably a straight A student, aren’t you? You probably go to dance class, don’t you?” Dill stuck out his arms and flicked his fingers across an imaginary keyboard. “‘Hi, my name is Peter,’” he said in a high, nasally muppet voice. “I play the piano and I practice every day!’”
“I do not!” Peter almost shouted, then looked around uneasily in case someone had heard.
“Then get dressed and let’s go. Unless you’re a weenie,” Dill said. “A wussy, wussy weenie.”
“No…” Peter said defensively. “I’m just…I’m kind of scared of heights.”
“Don’t look down.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Dude, I’ll go first. All you gotta do is go about three feet on the roof and then bam, you’re at the tree, and it’s easy from there. Just do what I do. Don’t worry, I won’t let you fall. Come on!”