Mystery of Drear House (7 page)

“But the both of us together, couldn’t we both handle them?” Great-grandmother Jeffers asked.

Mrs. Small shook her head. The land, full of caves, was on her mind. It was no place for boys to be free to roam. “It’s time they played with other children. You know, they never have much,” she said.

“Billy, Buster, move out the way!” Thomas yelled. He was back. Pesty had slipped out of the room, unnoticed, and now had returned with him. He had a breakfast tray for Great-grandmother Jeffers. It was the surprise.

“Oh!” Great-grandmother exclaimed. “I thought it would be nice if we spoiled you today,” Martha said.

“Oh my! You-all shouldn’t’ve gone to such trouble,” Great-grandmother said.

Gingerly Thomas carried the tray to her bedside. He was perspiring, for it hadn’t been easy getting up the stairs.

The twins scrambled to the foot of the bed as Thomas and Pesty placed the tray across Great-grandmother’s lap. The tray had panel legs that rested on each side of her. “Look at this!” said Great-grandmother Jeffers. “Thomas, you made these pancakes?”

“No, I just took the plate out of the oven and put everything on the tray.”

“Well! Martha, this is so sweet of you!” she said. “Billy, Buster, you’re going to help me with this food. And orange juice, too. And bacon, goodness!”

There was a neatly folded blue napkin next to the plate. There was silverware. Butter, syrup. The tray did look nice. “Come on, boys!” Great-grandmother said. “Get some of my pancakes.”

“Now take it easy.” Thomas warned his brothers.

They took it easy. They climbed down to stand by the bed next to the tray. “Pan-
cakes
!” said Billy. “Cakes!” Buster whispered.

They stood in line. Buster was first. Great-grandmother Jeffers spread butter and syrup on the pancakes. She cut a nice piece, speared it with her fork, and held it out to Buster. He took it all in one bite. “Ummmm!” he said.

Next, Billy took his portion in two bites. “Ummmm-huuum!” he moaned happily.

“That’s it, you guys,” Martha said. “We have to get going. Thomas, come help me with their coats and boots.”

Thomas and Pesty both helped, standing by the closet in the downstairs hall. The boys liked to grab Pesty around the neck. With their combined weight, they could topple her to her knees.

“Goodbye! Grandmother Rhetty? We’re going,” Martha called up the stairs.

“Bye!” said Billy and Buster. Now in their snowsuits, they were eager to go.

“Bye, you-all, have a good time,” Great-grandmother called from her room.

“Bye,” Thomas said.

“Bye, y’all!” Pesty added.

Then they were gone in the car. Pesty and Thomas watched it go down the road. By the time the two of them were back upstairs, Great-grandmother Jeffers was out of bed and in her bathrobe. The breakfast tray was on the floor.

“Take the tray, please, Thomas,” she said.

“But you haven’t eaten hardly a thing,” Thomas said.

“I know it,” Great-grandmother said. “I never eat much for breakfast. You-all wait for me downstairs,” she said to them. “I’ll get dressed and we’ll go.”

“We’re going to Mr. Pluto’s?” Thomas asked.

“Why not? Just let me get ready!” she said.

“M
AYBE Y’ALL COULD COME
over to my house, too,” Pesty said shyly to Thomas. “That would be something!” Thomas murmured. He set the tray down on the kitchen counter. He and Pesty ate the pancakes and bacon that Great-grandmother hadn’t eaten. “Mama’ll never know Great-grandmother Jeffers didn’t have her breakfast,” Thomas said. He took a pitcher of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured them tall glasses; put the pitcher back. They sat down with the juice at the kitchen table. They drank greedily.

“Well,” Thomas said when he had finished, “that’s my Great-grandmother Jeffers, come to stay.”

“She’s a nice old lady,” Pesty said.

“She always is,” Thomas said.

“Bet she’s a lot of fun,” Pesty said.

“She gets just as excited as I do over things,” Thomas said.

Sitting there, looking at the kitchen wall, he felt good about everything. Great-grandmother Jeffers brings good luck, he thought.

All at once he stiffened. He was staring at the wall that could rise. He gazed from the wall to the doorway and beyond to the front hallway and the front door at the other end. A creepy feeling light as feathers curled down his back as he remembered a weird and ghostly sighing he’d heard in the tunnel behind the kitchen wall. That was months ago, he thought.

“Mr. Thomas,” Pesty said softly, “what’s awrong with you, staring like that?”

He sighed. “Well, you remember the front steps and the tunnel?”

“Yeah! And you fell down in there, under the steps,” she said.

“Uh-huh, and it leads to here,” he said, “to the other side of this wall.”

“Me and Macky just knew about it coming to an end,” she said.

“That’s because you can’t get into here from the other side. You have to lift that wall from inside, in this kitchen,” he said. “Otherwise, it looks just like the tunnel comes to an end.” There’s: nothing behind it, he thought, looking at the wall. Slowly he got to his feet. He tiptoed over to the high cabinet opposite the tunnel wall. “I’m going to do it,” he said.

“Do what?” Pesty asked.

“I’m going to raise that wall,” he said.

“With your bare hands? I’d sure like to see that!” Pesty said.

Thomas laughed. “Watch the magic!” he said. He opened a cabinet drawer. The house was quiet about him, with no Billy or Buster running and banging around. It felt empty without his mama’s voice rising like summer light on the air. When Thomas listened hard, he imagined he could hear the limestone earth beneath the house seeping and percolating with snow-melt.

Don’t let it drip in the great cavern. Don’t let it cause a cave-in.

Thomas remembered seeing his papa take a mechanism from the machinery that raised and lowered the trick wall. His papa had put the mechanism in the drawer. Thomas opened the drawer and took it out. He next looked under the base of the high cabinet above the counter. There was a hidden panel. It slid open at his touch.

Pesty was there at his side. “Wow-wee!” she whispered.

“I saw Papa do this,” Thomas told her. But he had never done it himself.

Inside was the machinery for the trick wall. He placed the part in his hand in a section of the machinery where he thought it might go.

“Doesn’t seem to fit,” Pesty said.

“You’re right. I have to look for an empty space.”

“Try it here,” she said, pointing.

He tried it. “No,” he said, “but maybe … here? No. Here? Here!”

“Push the underpart in,” Pesty said.

“
That’s
where it goes. Now I’ll pull the lever.” Gently he pulled it.

They watched the trick wall. Pesty’s eyes were huge. Her mouth gaped.

Thomas’s scalp tingled as the wall rose.

“Thomaaas! Thomaaas!” A plaintive, distant voice called to him.

They were transfixed by the wall rising. The black hole of a tunnel entrance was exposed. It seemed to attack them with its damp and dark. A dank smell invaded the kitchen. But there was nothing at all that he could see beyond the tunnel opening. “Thomaaas!” came the voice again.

“Oh my goodness!” Thomas said. He flicked the lever, letting the wall slide back down.

“It’s just your great mother calling from upstairs,” Pesty said. But she had been frightened, too.

“I know it is,” he said. Now why do you upset yourself? he thought. You were sure it was somebody calling in that tunnel. “What is it, Great-grandmother?” he hollered. “I’m coming!” He remembered to close the cabinet drawer before he rushed out of the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs.

“Great-grandmother? I’m coming!” he called again. He bounded up the steps, taking them three at a time. Pesty was right behind him.

He rushed into Great-grandmother Jeffers’s room, only to find it empty.

Where?—Thomas hurried to his room, then, the twins’ room. She wasn’t in either room. “Great-grandmother,” he called, “where are you?”

“I’m here, Thomas” came the reply from a distance away.

“Well, man, she’s in the back bedroom we never use!” Thomas said.

“In here, Thomas,” he heard Great-grandmother say again.

Pesty was on her way down the hall first. “She’s in this room,” she said. The end of the hall was at the very rear of the upstairs.

The rear of the upstairs ended at a big window that looked out over the veranda, the rear yard, and the hill rising beyond. There was a room on either side of the hall, with windows also facing the back of the house. Thomas’s folks had dusted and polished the floors and then had closed the rooms. They hadn’t found any further use for them.

He opened the door, with Pesty at his elbow. At once he felt the chill air; he could smell the floor polish. There was a slight odor of stale dampness. It reminded him of the dankness that had come from the tunnel opening in the kitchen.

“What is it, Great-grandmother?” he said, coming up to her. “What are you doing in here?” She was standing facing the wall directly across from the door with her back to him. She was dressed for the day.

“Thomas,” she said, reaching out across him as he came up to her, as though to shield him. “Well,” she said, and sighed, “it’s hard to say what it is. But it is why I am in here.”

He took a step forward in order to see her face, but she pulled him back.

“You mustn’t go any closer,” she told him.

“Wh-why is that?” he said.

“Well. That—that … wall.”
That floor
was what she had first thought and at once had thought better of saying it. “Er, there was someone here.”

“There—there was?” Thomas managed to say, as the creeps came over him.

“Oh yes,” she said. “You see, I had come out of my room into the hall. Heard you-all in the kitchen. Thought sure I felt someone behind me. I turned around, yet all I saw was an empty hall. But after talking to Martha last night, I knew how she kept the unused rooms closed because of the twins. Well, I went to close one of the doors I saw was slightly open.” She sighed. “Just as I reached in to put my hand on the doorknob, someone reached out from inside that room and put a hand over mine.”

Thomas sucked in his breath. “No!” he said.

Great-grandmother nodded. “Just out of nowhere, someone put a hand over mine,” she repeated.

“Great-grandmother, who was it?” Thomas asked.

“Someone big, very big. That’s all I know,” she said. “Scared me! Almost had heart failure, too!” Great-grandmother Jeffers laughed nervously.

“Well, I came on in here. Managed to see it go— huh!” she said. “It left behind its motion, it felt like. Well. What I saw of it was the shape. A long, leggy shape, darkness. How strange! I was so taken by surprise. Who would expect something like that to happen in broad daylight?”

Silently Pesty walked around them, up to the wall.

“Pesty! Don’t!” Thomas held her back, but she shook loose from his grasp.

She stood there, just where Great-grandmother had warned Thomas not to stand, and knocked on the wall, as if she were knocking at the front door downstairs.

She knocked, pong, pong, pong. It made a hollow sound. She seemed to push the wall. She knocked a second time, pong, pong, pong.

The wall began to move; the floor in front of it commenced to turn.

Thomas couldn’t believe his eyes. A half circle of the floor with a section of the bedroom wall behind it was turning slowly to his right. At once Pesty stepped out of the turning part of the floor.

“You knew about this wall!” Thomas said to her.

Pesty said not a word. She stood there with her hands clasped in front of her, looking at the wall turning. The back of the wall, its other, hidden side, was coming around into view.

“It’s a circle,” Thomas whispered.

“And one-half of it hidden all the time,” Great-grandmother said softly. “But wait … maybe … you won’t believe …” What came around from behind was so unexpected. It was so shocking Thomas wanted to hide his face from it.

“That’s it, that’s what was there before,” Great-grandmother said.

Pesty stood there, calmly looking up. Thomas was looking up as well. And so was Great-grandmother Jeffers. Up and up.

“Mr. Thomas,” Pesty said. “Great Mother Jeffers,” she said soothingly. She reached out with gentle hands for what was there, for what had come from behind the wall.

The first thing Thomas noticed was the motion Great-grandmother Jeffers spoke about. Nervous, frantic motion was what came to mind.

Pesty took a few steps to the side where there was a table and turned on the small brass lamp by a straight chair near the wall. The lamp gave off a soft glow of light.

“Mr. Thomas,” Pesty said. She went back over to the turned wall. She had her hand now on the one who had come. “She didn’t mean anything. Didn’t mean to scare your great-grandmother.”

“What?” Thomas said, barely out loud. He was staring at the one so tall.

“Y’all,” Pesty said to them. “Want you to meet my mama. She wasn’t following Great Mother Jeffers down the hall. It’s just that this house was hers to wander before y’all ever came to live here.

“But don’t move too sudden,” Pesty continued. “Mama not too well, though she up and around again.”

Thomas and Great-grandmother Jeffers simply stared. The place that had turned had a handsome stone fireplace with a marble mantel. The woman stood on the wide hearth, crouched a bit, leaning her back against the mantel.

“Oh!” Thomas said. He realized then that she wasn’t a giant, as he had thought. She was about six inches off the floor up on the raised stone hearth. But she was still big and tall, probably the tallest, the biggest, and the most different woman Thomas had ever seen. She sent out a powerful magnetism. It was as if electricity surrounded her. He could almost feel its prickly current. It wasn’t possible. But there it was.

M
RS.
D
ARROW HAD THICK
black hair that fanned out over her shoulders to cascade down her back, below her waist. The long dress she wore was a worn and shabby tent cinched at the waist. It had a neck hole and holes for her hands out of the long sleeves gathered at her wrists. It had heavily padded shoulders as stiff and flat as boards. It looked like a shelter of cloth stretched over her huge figure from neck to ankles. She wore it like a protective armor. She might have been five feet eleven inches or even over six feet tall, Thomas supposed. And she might have weighed two hundred, three hundred pounds, he couldn’t be sure. But she didn’t look fat. Just big.