The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp (15 page)

“Eureka!” I exclaimed, smacking my forehead. “Don’t you get it, Jeremy?”

He didn’t seem to.

“This here recreational facility is named in memory of Miss Fuller, the Girls’ Gym teacher. It’s bound to be!”

Jeremy rubbed the bowl near his chin.

“And that media center back yonder is named in memory of Miss Spaulding.”

Jeremy nodded.

“
Miss
Spaulding,” I explained, “and
Miss
Fuller. They kept their maiden names right to the grave!”

“And that was good?” he pondered.

“Shoot, yes. It means that neither one of them fell into the clutches of Mr. Ambrose Lacy and married that two-timing polecat.”

“Oh.”

“I bet you
I
had something to do with that.” I grinned evilly. “In fact, I ought to be getting back to 1914 this very minute, and—”

“Come on, Blossom.” Jeremy caught up my hand and pulled me along back toward the streetcar right-of-way. “Let’s see some more. This is interesting. Really.”

And of course it was. And about to get more so.

As we threaded our way along through the alleys, I knew we’d soon come to the place where me and Mama lived. Jeremy knew, too, as I’d told him how me and her occupied a property hard by the tracks right behind Alexander Armsworth’s barn.

As we trudged along, Jeremy said, “You won’t be too disappointed if—”

“Not me. Our place was fixing to fall down even back then. If Letty’s big house hasn’t held up, I can’t expect too much from our old dump.”

Which was just as well. When we came to the home of my youth, there was nothing there but smoothly mowed grass and a tremendous big horse
tank with soft sides of a bright blue color. It was brimming with water, but not a horse in sight.

“Well, that’s where me and Mama lived,” I said, just lightly stroking her fur piece. “But what in the Sam Hill do you call that big soft horse tank?”

“That’s an aboveground swimming pool,” Jeremy said. “But look, Blossom, that barn you told me about is still here.”

And so it was. I chanced a look at it from the corner of my eye. The barn on the old Armsworth property stood where it always had, in good repair, too.

I shrank then and felt the chill winds of autumn around my heart. Oh, I didn’t fear that barn because it had once been haunted. It wasn’t the past that worried me. It was this future.

His globe glancing everywhere, Jeremy waddled to the far side of the barn while I remained rooted to the spot. He waved a padded arm for me to follow, but I wouldn’t. I still felt the chill.

Presently I saw his silver form returning around the corner of the bam. “It’s still there, Blossom,” he said, loud inside his bowl. “A great big old house with fancy porches and turrets and a lot of colored glass over the doors. It’s nice.”

“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “it was always one of the better addresses.”

“And guess what, Blossom. It’s still being lived in. They haven’t turned it into a media center or a recreational facility or a free clinic or anything. There
are curtains at all the windows and pots of flowers on the sills. There’s a power mower on the lawn, and they’ve even got all their leaves bagged. There’s a Buick Century in the driveway. Come on, let’s check the place out. We can always pull the old trick-or-treat number on them.” Jeremy bounced in his space boots and reached for my hand.

But I drew it back.

I thought of the Armsworth mansion as I’d known it. I smelled bacon frying and thought of the Armsworths having their breakfast every morning as I made my way to school across their property. I thought of Alexander Armsworth. And not just as the kid I’d known. I thought of myself, too, as I was and as I would be.

“No, Jeremy,” I said. “I better not find out who those people are up in the house now. There’s some things about the future a person ought not to know. I think we should turn back now.”

“Back?” Jeremy said faintly. His hand was still out for mine.

“Back to Bluffleigh Heights, and then I think we better say our good-byes.”

There was a small lump in my throat, for many reasons, and a small lump in Jeremy’s, too. I noticed it just under the rim of his bowl.

W
E HAD NO TROUBLE
getting past Jeremy’s mama and back up to his room. It was just evening, and we had the shadowy upstairs to ourselves. Tiffany wasn’t home. The mall hadn’t closed.

The dark corners made the place more like the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse. Once in his room with the door closed behind us, Jeremy reached for the light switch, but I drew his hand away.

“I might get back better in the dark,” I said.

He turned away from me and eased the fishbowl off his head. “Oh, wow. I’m glad to get out of that thing. I guess this is about my last year for Halloween, the costume part at least.”

His head of hair was faintly red in the failing light. It stood up in peaks. He slipped off his hubcaps and massaged his knees. Then he took off his spectacles and breathed on them. He was only playing for time.

“I’ve had a real nice visit, Jeremy. Many thanks.”

“My pleasure,” he said politely. I reckon his voice
was changing, for it cracked then. “Come back any . . . time.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I guess I can figure how I happened to pay this particular call.”

“There were the electrical storms,” he said, “one at my end and one at—”

“I doubt it was the weather, Jeremy. I figure maybe you needed a friend.”

He wasn’t sure. “Looks like you came a really long way just to spend a little time with me.”

“Well, there’s nothing more important than friendship,” I said. “I get a little lonesome now and again myself. Maybe I came for us both.”

“Seems like you just got here, and now you’re leaving.”

“Well, that’s me all over,” I told him. “Busy every minute. Tonight I’ll be at Old Man Leverette’s town residence, teaching Alexander’s bunch a lesson. Then tomorrow night I’ll be right here in this very house, telling fortunes.

“Did I tell you we of the freshman class are running your place as a Haunted House? We’re going to stretch Champ Ferguson out on the drainboard as a monster and run a crackerjack dungeon and model torture chamber in your cellar. We’re going to have ghosts in your corners and bats in your belfry. We’re going to charge ten cents.”

“It sounds great,” Jeremy said with his head down. “Wish I could come along.”

But he couldn’t, and he knew it.

“You can be there in . . . spirit,” I said. “You can think of us tomorrow night seventy years ago. I could even tell my fortunes right here in your room. Shall I?”

He nodded. His eyes were glistening. Maybe mine were, too.

“Blossom, since you’ve got to be going, I guess I can tell you this.” Jeremy rubbed one of his padded legs with his big boot. “I haven’t had too much experience with knowing girls. But I really like you, a lot. Of course, you’re . . . different.”

“Oh, well, shoot,” I said, my face a little warm, “I’ve been called different even in my own time.”

Jeremy smiled a little and scratched his red thatch. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if I was Alexander Armsworth, it wouldn’t be Letty Shambaugh I was taking to the . . . moving pictures.”

The last light left the room then. There was nobody to see, and with any luck I’d soon be gone. So I thought:
Oh, well, shoot.
Then I stepped forward and gave Jeremy a little kiss good-bye.

He took it real well. Then he said, “Blossom, when you’re gone, how will I know you were ever really here? I see you’re real now, but later I might wonder.”

“Like I was only a stage you were going through?” I asked him. “And later you outgrew it?”

“Like that,” he said, “basically.”

I chanced to glance down at my spelling medal then. It was hanging by a thread from Mama’s old ratty coat. I’d sworn to wear that medal till it fell off me. I gave it a little tug, and it came loose in my hand.

“Here.” I held it out to him. “I was the champion speller of Horace Mann School. This medal was at one time my most prized possession. Take it to remember me by. It will always remind you that you have a friend, a good old friend.”

Jeremy reached out and pulled back. “Tell you what, Blossom. Take it along with you on your trip and hide it somewhere in this house, somewhere I can find it later on if I begin to forget. Sometime when I’m lonesome again, like I was before you came.”

“Let me see,” I pondered. “Where’d be a place safe for seventy years?” Then it came to me. “You know that china closet down in your dining room? Roderick hid in there one time and liked to scare the wits out of Alexander Armsworth, though it didn’t faze me.”

“China closet?” Jeremy said. “Oh, yes, we keep the stereo components in there.”

“First time you get lonesome, check around in there. You’ll find this spelling medal of mine under a loose floorboard. That’ll be a sign I’m thinking of you.”

“Is there a loose floorboard?”

“There will be.”

It was time to go then, and we both knew it.
Jeremy drifted over to his machines. They looked dead as doornails to me, and I don’t suppose he could get a beep out of them. But he said, “I could try a little patching and looping to . . . help you off the launching pad.”

But I told him I’d better try to do it my way. It was almost night then, and we were two dark shapes in the room—three if you count Darth Vader. I fastened my beanie tight with the hatpin and arranged Mama’s fur piece so it wouldn’t strangle me if I got up speed.

“This is the part I’m never sure about,” I admitted. “I have to give it my all.”

It grew darker then, dark as a pocket. I heard a distant sighing sound. It was the wind pump out past the chicken coop on the old abandoned Leverette farm. I cocked my ears to hear it clearer and let my brain go blank. I commenced to Vibrate, and I felt my mysterious Powers take charge.

Wind blew through Jeremy’s window, for there was no glass in it now. A whirlwind circled my form and gave me goosebumps. There was a shower of sparks, but cold and white as snow. Or maybe these were the white pages torn from seventy calendars. Whatever they were, they gusted into a tremendous cyclone.

I never moved, and I traveled like the wind.

It was a gentle landing as these things go. There was no carpet on the floor now. The heels of my
boots bumped on bare boards. They were gritty with plaster dust.

I’d kept my eyes tight shut, though not from fear exactly. When I looked around me, I was in the empty, ruined upstairs room of the old abandoned Leverette farmhouse. Pale moonlight fell through the broken window. My spelling medal was in my hand.

I walked toward the moonlight right through the emptiness where Jeremy’s machines had been—would be. Torn wallpaper hung down in curls, and I smelled the smells of an empty old house far from town: the mildew and wood rot and dead field mice in the walls.

I chanced a look out the window. There I saw the black branches of Leverette’s Woods beyond the gate to Lovers’ Lane. The wind pump was back too, singing and turning in the night breeze. There was the chicken coop, right where it should be. In one of its windows was a coal oil lamp. The lamp burned low, for it was past Roderick’s bedtime.

I looked for the blanket of glittering lights as far as the eye could see. I looked for the golden arches and “40
BILLION SOLD
.” But they weren’t there, not yet. It was the night before Halloween. And it was 1914. My next thought was of Mama.

I cut and ran for home.

“Girl, where you bin?”

Before I could get across the threshold, she came
down on me like the Johnstown flood. I was out of breath from . . . much traveling, and I sagged somewhat in the doorframe.

Mama’s teeth were out, but she was speaking clear. “You was gone all night and all day, too! I’ll larn youoph.”

She reached for Paw’s razor strop that hangs over the pitcher and bowl. She saves this back for special occasions. Believe it or not, I was glad to see her.

“Well, Mama,” I said, hoping to distract her, “have you had your supper?”

“Of course I ain’t! And I see you come back empty-handed. I couldn’t eat a bite anyhow.” At least she seemed to forget the strop. The dice dangling down from her ears danced, and her flinty eyes bored into me.