The Tilting House (10 page)

Grandpa leaned his wooden leg out the doorway. His wooden foot went
tap, tap, tap
, against nothing we could see.

Dad inched his way across the invisible porch, down invisible
steps, all the way down to the visible front yard. When he turned to face the house, he gasped. “Oh, my. Come and look.”

Aaron and I carefully made our way to the yard. We turned and faced the house. It was gone. Mom and Grandpa floated in the open front door, with the hallway and kitchen still visible behind them. Dad tried to reassure Mom by jumping up and down on the invisible porch. He even felt his way over to the invisible porch swing, sat down in it, and started swinging. It looked pretty weird.

“Maybe we can paint it,” Dad said.

“You just finished painting it, Hal!” said Mom with a sob. Then she slammed the door shut. From where we stood, our house now looked like it didn’t exist.

We were standing in the front yard discussing what to do when Mrs. Natalie came over from next door. “What the heck happened to your house, Hal?” she asked. Dad said he didn’t know what had happened and that the house was still there even though no one could see it. Mrs. Natalie raised her eyebrows. Dad stepped up to the invisible porch and walked across it. Mrs. Natalie raised her eyebrows even more. Dad felt around, then opened the front door, which looked to be attached to nothing, and Mrs. Natalie could see our hallway, same as ever, except that it was floating four feet in the air. She raised her eyebrows even higher until her eyes rolled back inside her head. With a ladylike groan, she passed out right on the grass.

All the neighbors kept coming over, asking what had happened to our house. Dad kept trying to explain, walking around on the porch to show them it was still there. I could tell he was getting tired of it. At one point, while all the grown-ups were standing around talking, two boys from another neighborhood rode by on their bikes and tried to cut through what must have
looked like our vacant lot. Too late, I yelled, “Watch out!” They crashed into the side of our invisible house. Dad marched over to the boys, who were sitting on the ground looking stunned and said, “There’s a house there, you know.”

Dad’s mood grew even worse after his boss, Mr. Stevens, finally came by to take a look at all the scribbles on our walls. Mr. Stevens’s face was so tan and round, it looked like a basketball with eyes. When he saw—or didn’t see—our house, he frowned and said, “This isn’t the kind of publicity we need right now, Hal.” As if Dad had intentionally turned our house invisible. Dad promised to take care of it, then started grumbling as soon as Mr. Stevens left. He hadn’t even come inside to see the diagrams and writings.

Aaron, Lola, and I spent most of that Sunday opening and closing the invisible front door, climbing in and out of the invisible windows, and leaning against the invisible walls. It looked so cool. Overnight, Tilton House had turned into something out of a science fiction movie.

Grandpa sat on the invisible porch swing all day, throwing out different questions and theories to Dad: “Have you checked with the city?” “Maybe you forgot to pay your cable bill.” “It’s probably some kind of government experiment we don’t know about.”

I liked throwing a football through the front door, because if you stood outside at just the right angle, the football seemed to disappear. Aaron kept asking me to open and close the upstairs windows. He said it looked like a square of our house popped right out of the sky. Mom and Dad wanted the old house back, but I hoped Tilton House would stay invisible forever. “Think how awesome it would look if it snowed,” I said to Lola.

“My mom says it’s going to lower the neighborhood property values,” she said. “And it could be dangerous. Do you have any
idea what made your house disappear? What if it’s contagious? What if tomorrow
you
wake up invisible?”

“You’re just jealous,” I said. Lola stared at me in silence, then turned on her heel and walked to her neat, level, visible home.

I went inside to look at something I’d remembered seeing scrawled on one of our walls. It was right above the top of the couch.

The writing beneath that mentioned something called Snell’s Law, which made it clear that given the precisely correct conditions, light could be bent backward upon itself, rendering objects undetectable to the human eye. Next to the text was a complicated wiring diagram. I studied the diagram, wondering if it would explain how the house became invisible.

Mom stayed inside the entire day, talking on the phone to her friends about what had happened. She never once walked across the invisible porch. She answered a call from a newspaper reporter who wanted to stop by to take pictures, and she seemed excited about that—I know Aaron and I were. Since there was no house, she said she didn’t know what the reporter planned to take pictures of. She said it would make more sense if a TV crew came so they could film Dad walking across the porch or swinging in the swing. Dad seemed less excited. I guess he was remembering what Mr. Stevens had said about bad publicity for the museum. He called the reporter back and asked him not to come. The reporter said he appreciated the call and hung up.

Since Dad couldn’t fix the house’s invisibility, he tried to fix the dimmer switch instead. He fiddled with it that night after dinner,
but the chandelier still wouldn’t work, so he quit, unknowingly leaving the dimmer switch turned halfway up. We couldn’t tell from the inside, but from the outside, our house was now halfway visible. You could see it, but at the same time you could see through it to the backyard. That’s how it looked the next morning when the newspaper reporter arrived with a camera slung around his neck. Dad met him outside and asked him not to take pictures, as it would cause Dad trouble at work. The reporter, whose name was Van Leopold, nodded his head but started taking pictures anyway.

That picture covered the front page of the local paper the next day. Most people thought the photograph was a fake, but Dad said that wouldn’t help matters with Mr. Stevens. On top of that, the article mentioned that Dad was the curator of the art museum.

After the reporter left, we were all having lunch in the kitchen when Aaron mentioned that the house looked “like it was dimmed.” Mom frowned at Aaron, dashed into the dining room, and turned the dimmer switch all the way up. She ran to the front door, threw it open, and looked outside. “Hah!” she yelled triumphantly, jumping up and down. “I knew it! The house is back! My beautiful house!”

Sure enough, the house was visible again.

Dad couldn’t believe the dimmer switch had caused all this trouble, so he went back to the dining room to test it by turning the switch off again, but Mom yelled at him from the porch, “Don’t you dare touch that switch, Hal! Nobody touches that switch! And next time you put one in, you’re getting Mr. Daga to help you!”

Mom covered the switch with duct tape to keep anyone from turning it. We ’ve never touched it since. Well, almost never.
Sometimes when we order a pizza from Big Sam’s, I might untape the switch and turn it down, but only for half an hour. Because as Big Sam says, “If the pizza isn’t delivered in half an hour, you don’t have to pay.”

F
OR
A
ARON, IT WAS LOVE
at first sight.

The object of his affection was Mrs. Natalie’s new dog. Mrs. Natalie had grown lonely since Mr. Natalie’s death, so it didn’t surprise us when she came over one day to introduce Dinky, a Maltese, as white as a puffy cloud and only a little bigger than a house cat. Before Dinky came along, Aaron had hated dogs. But Dinky immediately won him over by being so small and cute.

For Dinky, it was love at first sniff. I don’t think she’d ever smelled an eight-year-old boy before. Aaron always had something sticky in his pocket or on his hands. And Aaron wanted to play. Her owner may have been a nice old lady, but Dinky’s heart
belonged to Aaron. Luckily, Dinky’s jumping and barking and chewing wore Mrs. Natalie out, so she always seemed happy for a break when Aaron came by.

Dinky chewed on everything, barked at everything, ran circles around everything, and did it all at full speed. Mrs. Natalie put up with her because Dinky always seemed happy, and Mrs. Natalie needed happiness around her.

But it was my brother who made Dinky happiest of all. If he took a single step outside Tilton House, Dinky would explode out of the little doggie door that Mrs. Natalie had asked Grandpa to install. She would run at Aaron, jump all over him, bark with joy, and wiggle uncontrollably for five minutes. Aaron would dash around the block with Dinky giving chase, or the pair would wrestle on the grass or sprawl on the living room floor as Dinky and her sharp teeth destroyed another pair of shoes.

When I appeared, she would run at me and jump on me for ten seconds or so. Same with Lola or Mom or Dad. But she’d always return to Aaron. If she could, she’d be touching him at all times, pressed against his leg or wiggling all over his lap.

Late one afternoon, Lola and I were sitting on the floor in my bedroom, trying to open the bottom drawer of the metal box that I had found in the attic. Aaron was on his side of the room speaking to Dinky as if she were a human.

“
Ilex aquifolium,
” said Aaron, slowly reading the words written on the bedroom ceiling. “Can you say that, Dinky?” Dinky responded with pants and growls.

“Who do you think put the grow powder in this box?” asked Lola.

“I figure it has to be the same guy who wrote all over the walls.”

“But why would he go to all the trouble of hiding the box in the attic? And of using a tiny key to lock it?” Lola looked up from fiddling with the box. “Do you have a knife or something?”

“Do I ever have a knife!” I reached under my bed to pull out the machete-sized pocketknife. It wasn’t there. I bent down to look and saw something about the size of Grandpa’s lighter. I pulled it out. It was the knife, but it was tiny again.

“It shrank!” I said.

“No, it’s perfect,” said Lola. She tried to insert the tip of the knife into the seams of the box, but the box was so well built that even the tiny knife couldn’t penetrate.

When Lola turned the box upside down to examine the underside, scraps from the envelope that had contained the growth powder fell to the floor. In a flash, Dinky zipped across the room and started eating the bits of paper.

“Smart dog you have there,” said Lola.

“He is smart,” said Aaron. “And since you think you’re so smart, he’s not even a he. He’s a she.”

Lola grunted and turned her attention back to the metal box. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, wondering how I could prove that the Purple Door Man had stolen our bikes. I could still hear Aaron and Dinky happily growling and talking to each other. Dinky’s growls rose in pitch, as if her tail had been stepped on. Then they took on a gargly tone before stopping altogether. I rolled over to see what was going on, and sat up immediately. Dinky’s eyes were bulging and her tongue hung out of her mouth.

“Your genius dog is choking,” said Lola.

“Mind your own beeswax,” said Aaron, but he looked scared.

“I’m not kidding.” Lola dropped the metal box and grabbed Dinky. “Aaron! He’s choking! Why’d you make his collar so tight?”

I picked up the knife from the floor and started sawing at the collar.

“I didn’t touch her collar!” Aaron shrieked.

All at once, the collar broke with a snap. Dinky started coughing and shaking. She panted a few times, then wriggled free from Lola and ran into Aaron’s arms as if nothing had happened.

“A real smart dog you have there,” said Lola. “Not only does he eat paper, but he chokes himself, too.”

“He’s a
she!
” said Aaron.

From downstairs, Mom yelled that it was time for dinner. Aaron walked Dinky back to Mrs. Natalie for the night.

The next morning, Aaron and I hung around in the living room, playing Monopoly. At about eleven, I was winning when Mom chased us outside into the sunshine. As soon as we were in the front yard, we heard Dinky barking. Her head popped out of her doggie door, then her front feet. Then she stopped. She barked again. Her furry body completely filled the door. She wiggled, barked, and strained against the door until the rest of her body followed. She bounced down the porch steps and ran over to Aaron.