The Tilting House (2 page)

He leaned back and then pointed his pipe stem at the man across the street—the same old man we’d seen before. “Interesting gentleman over there,” said Grandpa. “He’s been sitting jabbering to himself for the last half hour.”

Later that afternoon, after we’d unloaded most of the boxes, Mom dragged Aaron and me over to say hello to our new neighbor. He looked even older than Grandpa. His white hair was combed straight back. His face was deeply wrinkled, and thick eyebrows nearly hid his eyes. Weirdly enough, though, his clothes looked freshly ironed.

The man didn’t look up when we got to his porch. He just kept muttering to himself.

“Maybe he’s hard of hearing,” said Aaron. “
HELLO! WE’RE YOUR NEW NEIGHBORS!
” The Talker—that’s what we later named him—continued to stare straight ahead at our house.

“She may have been the rawest and most unlettered of the talking picture stars,” he mumbled. “The entire contents of the box had escaped. Only one thing remained.” Then he said something about a place called St. Hubert and “a dead Belgian with staring eyes.” Mom pushed us along as we walked quickly back across the street.

Immediately to the south of our new house sat a duplex. There were two mailboxes and two front doors—one leading to the upstairs apartment and the other to the downstairs one. Nobody lived in either. The grass needed mowing.

To the north sat the house with the boarded windows. Faded sky blue paint was peeling off its remaining shingles. A purple front door was buried behind wagon wheels, stuffed animals, old
mailboxes, and a huge set of deer antlers. The grass needed mowing there, too.

The man who lived in the house with the purple door had a mop of greasy gray hair and wore flip-flops, shorts, and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. He glared at Aaron and me on moving day when we said hi to him.

“Keep it down.”

“Keep what down?” I asked.

“The noise.”

All the other houses on our block had fresh paint and neat yards, and the neighborhood overall seemed pretty normal.

But the only other kid our age who lived on Holly Street told me it wasn’t. Her name was Lola. She lived in the green house on the corner with her mom and stepdad. She was a year younger than me, but taller by at least three inches.

“It’s definitely not normal around here,” she said, twirling a strand of curly dark hair. “And you’re living in the weirdest house of all. Everyone says so. The tilting floors are just the beginning.”

“What do you mean?” I may have agreed that our new house was weird, but I didn’t like her saying so.

She shook her head. All she would say was, “No one’s seen the guy who lived there for sixty years. And my stepdad says you have rats.”

Lola was right. We found the rats the very next day. The day somebody died in our new house with the tilting floors. Somebody named Jimmy.

M
OM HAD HOPED
that Dad would change his mind and paint over the walls before we moved in. I’d hoped so, too. There was no way I was going to invite friends over to this place with the walls looking like that. But they remained covered in cryptic writing as we unpacked boxes in the kitchen. “I’m not going to be happy if I have to live with all these scribbles,” said Mom.

“Don’t think of them as scribbles, honey. Think of them as art,” said Dad. “The man was probably a crazy genius!”

“You need to take down that wallpaper, Hal.”

“First I have to schedule a professional photo shoot. It’s my responsibility as an art curator.”

“When is that going to happen?”

“I’ll put it on my to-do list.”

That afternoon, Dad took a break from arranging and unloading and found Aaron and me in the living room where we were shelving books. Dad plunked down on the couch, and his body leaned to the right. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and let out a sigh. “Guess I’m gonna have to prop up all the furniture.”

I stared at the words on the wall behind his head:

It didn’t look like art to me. It looked like something I was supposed to have learned in school.

“Whaddya say you boys and me take five and poke around a bit?”

“Poke around where?” I asked.

“Around our new house. I’ll bet if we look in every nook and cranny, we’ll uncover a secret or two.”

“A secret?” asked Aaron. “What kind of secret?”

“I don’t know.” Dad grinned as he struggled to get up from the tilting couch. “A house built with tilting floors has got to have secrets.”

“It’s got to have a screw loose,” I said.

“Smart aleck.”

We started in the garage and found a dusty clock tucked away on a corner shelf. We wiped it off and brought it inside to see if it worked.

“Too bad we don’t have a fireplace,” said Dad. “We could set this on the mantel.”

“I’m glad we don’t have one,” said Aaron.

“Why?”

“Because the floors tilt. I might fall into the fire.”

Dad said we needed to find a level surface to test the clock. “It’s not going to be easy in this house,” he said, clearing a moving box off the dining room table and setting the clock down. He started the pendulum swinging, and the clock ticked happily away.

“Hal,” said Grandpa from the other end of the table, where he’d been working on a crossword, “it appears you set that clock down on the one thing in this house that’s not tilting.”

The dining room set had come with the house. Dad figured it had belonged to the previous owner.

“Why doesn’t the table tilt?” asked Dad, leaning down and looking at the legs.

“Don’t you see? The table and chairs were custom made for this house. Look, the legs at that end are longer than the legs at this end. Whoever made them did some excellent work.” Grandpa patted the smooth surface of the table.

“It’s a long shot, but I’ll bet.…” Grandpa slipped out of his seat and examined the underside of the table. “I knew it! Look at this, boys!”

We all crouched under the table. “See this name carved here?”

“Who’s ‘Lennis’?” Dad asked.

Grandpa gave Dad a sour look and pulled himself back into his chair. He rolled up the pant leg to reveal his wooden leg. “This,” he said, “is Lennis. Or I should say, Lennis is the name of the old codger who carved this stump. Best carpenter I ever met. Must’ve made this dining room set, too.”

“You think this table’s worth something?”

“Only to someone with tilting floors.”

“We ‘ve got plenty of those,” I said.

Dad wanted to look in the crawl space under the house, so Aaron and I followed him outside to a three-foot-high door under the back porch. We unlatched it and looked inside. Spiderwebs stretched across the doorway, with nothing beyond but darkness.

“No way am I going in there,” I said. “You go, Dad.”

“I bet no one’s been down here in fifty years. Maybe we can find out why this house was built with tilting floors.”

“Close the door,” said Aaron. “I don’t like it.”

“Me neither. Can we just finish unpacking?” I asked. I could feel goose bumps on my arms and legs.

“Aww, come on, you scaredy-cats,” said Dad. “This is uncharted territory.” He ducked and found a light switch. A yellow bulb cast shadows across the crawl space. Dad hunched inside, batting cobwebs as he went. Aaron and I stood in the doorway, as still as stones.

“Nothing but dirt,” Dad called back to us. The cobwebs frosting his hair made him look old, like Grandpa.

We went back into the house. In the second-floor bathroom we found a cupboard next to the toilet. Mom came in with a box of cleaning supplies and asked Aaron and me to put them in there. While Dad continued searching the house, we hurried to fill the cupboard with scrub brushes, spray bottles, and rolls of paper towels. We slammed the door and heard a scream from the floor below.

Aaron and I ran downstairs to find Mom standing in the laundry room, rubbing her head gingerly. Paper towels and bottles of cleaner lay scattered at her feet. We all looked up and saw an open trapdoor in the ceiling.

I ran back upstairs and opened the cupboard. It was empty now.

“Heads up!” I yelled and tossed a pink washcloth in the cupboard. I closed the door, then opened it. The washcloth was gone. When I raced downstairs again, the cloth was resting crookedly on top of Mom’s head.

“It’s a laundry chute,” Mom said. “When you close the door up there, this one down here opens and drops everything on my head. So please stop.”

Back in the bathroom, we found words and numbers scratched into the mirror above the sink. When I looked at my reflection, I could see two words right above my face.

“
Rattus rattus,
” I whispered. Aaron began chanting the words over and over.

“
Rattus! Rattus!
”

“Quiet!” I yelled. Below my chin were the words “Biological, acoustical information transfer. Sound and meaning. Tongue clicks vs. squeaks.” None of it made any sense.

“
Rattus! Rattus!
” shouted Aaron, pulling me away from the mirror and across the hall to our room.

I’d argued briefly for my own room, but Aaron had looked so worried about sleeping alone that I gave in without much of a fight. At least I wasn’t on the living room couch—and now I had a door that closed, a real bed, and walls for hanging posters.

Drawings of prickly leaves, little round berries, and squatty trees covered the walls of our bedroom. They were holly trees, just like the ones growing outside. The words
ilex aquifolium
were scrawled everywhere, along with sketches of seeds and cutaway diagrams of tree trunks. We were going to need a lot of posters.

A coworker of Dad’s had given us an old set of bunk beds, and Mom had leveled them on the tilting floor by stacking books under one end. Now they were level but wobbly. Aaron climbed
up to his top bunk and began rocking the beds back and forth. “
Rattus! Rattus!
I got the top bunk and you got the bottom.
Rattus! Rattus!
” shouted Aaron.

“Would you knock it off and come on up here!” called Dad from somewhere above us. “I think I found something!” We followed his voice to the master bedroom where a door opened to a steep stairway that led to the third floor—or the All-the-Way-Up Room, as Aaron had already named it.

The floors up there tilted toward the center just like everywhere else. The walls were covered in even more scribbles, so crammed together that they were nearly impossible to read. Dad stood at the far end of the room next to a panel built into the wall—it was the same size as the door to the crawl space.

“What do you think is in there, boys?”

I shrugged. Aaron looked worried. Dad dropped to his knees and pushed on the panel. We heard a click and the panel swung outward.

“I guess it’s the attic,” said Dad. “I wonder how big it is.” He stuck his head inside. “It’s dark, but it looks like it’s full of boxes!” He began to feel around. “I can’t find a light switch.”

Suddenly, he screamed and jerked his head out of the doorway. Something furry clung to the top of his head. Dad slapped at it, but whatever it was had its claws buried in Dad’s hair. Finally, he grabbed it, then let out another scream. “Aaauugghh! It bit me!” He threw the little animal to the floor and brought his shoe down on it, hard. I heard a tiny crack, like the sound of a potato chip breaking. Then the animal lay still.

Aaron and I stared at it. Dad breathed heavily. “I think it’s a rat. Just a baby,” he said, with a half laugh. “No big deal. Probably just wandered in from outside. No need to tell your mom.”

“But you hurt him,” Aaron said, his voice breaking. “You killed him. You killed the baby rattus!” Aaron cried until his shoulders shook. Dad hugged him, but Aaron kept crying and repeating, “You killed the baby rattus!”

When Aaron finally calmed down, the room grew quiet. That’s when we heard someone else crying—a soft, uneven sound.

“It sounds like it’s coming from the attic,” I said, pointing to the door. We all looked at one another.

“Come on,” Dad said. “Let’s find a flashlight.” After a few minutes of unsuccessfully searching for a working flashlight, we returned with a lamp and an extension cord.

The body of the baby rat had disappeared.