The Tilting House (8 page)

T
HE ATTIC FILLED WITH DUST
. Light shone up from the room below. The heavy box was still in my hands.

I listened for Mom’s voice or the sound of her footsteps. Nothing. I looked down. Splintered wood and plaster jabbed my waist, keeping me from falling. It hurt. Very carefully, I set the box down on the nearest beam and tried to pull myself up and out. The plaster and wood cut deeper into me. I tried to twist around, but I was lodged tightly.

If I called Mom for help, she’d yell at me. And she’d call Dad for sure. But even if I could manage to get out on my own, there was no way I could hide that hole.

“Mom?” I called softly into the cobwebs and dust of the attic. No response. “Mom!” I shouted. Still nothing. I yelled at the top of my lungs. I yelled for minutes on end. “Mom! Help!” No one came.

Maybe no one would ever come. Maybe I’d be stuck here until the batteries ran out on my headlamp. Maybe spiders were crawling over my head right now, getting ready to sink their fangs into me. I ran my hands through my hair in a panic.

The house held me tight. And not in a comforting way. “You may not always like me,” the house seemed to be saying, “but you’re not going anywhere and neither am I.”

Finally, after what felt like half an hour, I heard a noise below that sounded like the back door slamming.

“Josh?” came the distant sound of Mom’s voice.

“I’m up here!” I yelled.

The voice came closer. “I was in the backyard. Did you call me?”

“Yes!”

“Is everything all right?”

“No.”

I heard the sound of hurrying footsteps on the stairs, then Mom’s voice directly below me. “Oh my Lord. Are you hurt?”

“I’m stuck.”

Mom called Dad, who came home in spite of the measles quarantine. After an hour of careful cutting with a saw, I fell into Dad’s arms. Red scrapes circled my waist. I tried to play them off as no big deal, but they really hurt. Mom yelled at me for disobeying her order to stay out of the attic, and Dad yelled at me for making the hole in the ceiling and forcing him to come home from work in the middle of the day. Then Mom hugged me for a while and
sprayed a bunch of Bactine on my scrapes, which isn’t supposed to hurt but always stings like crazy anyway. Dad said we would talk later about consequences, but he had to return to work before he got in trouble with Mr. Stevens.

I had grabbed the box before Dad pulled me out. Dad barely looked at it, probably because he was in such a hurry to get back to work.

Dad, Grandpa, and Aaron returned home the next day. When they pulled up in front of Tilton House, I went outside for the first time since the measles began.

After Dad helped him out of the car, Grandpa stared at the house and whistled. “You done good, son.” I turned. Dad had nearly finished painting during my quarantine. Now the house had bright white trim and shutters against rich gray-blue walls. It looked all dressed up and ready to meet the mayor.

Dad smiled proudly. I smiled, too. The house still looked crazy on the inside, but I was kind of proud of how it looked on the outside.

Dad and Grandpa set about patching the hole in the ceiling with boards, sheetrock, and plaster. I had to help and also had to pay for part of the supplies out of my allowance. I didn’t mind. I figured I owed the house that much.

“Promise me you won’t go into the attic anymore,” Mom said.

“I don’t want you making any more holes,” said Dad. “I got enough work around here as it is.”

“Which reminds me,” said Mom. “When are you going to paint the inside of this place?”

“I haven’t photographed the walls yet,” replied Dad as he walked away, “but don’t worry. It’s on my to-do list.”

Aaron and I examined the metal box on my first break from helping patch the ceiling. The box was olive green and heavy and, unlike most boxes, didn’t open at the top. Instead, there were two drawers under a keyhole. The metalwork around the keyhole was shaped like a capital T.

I pulled the bottom drawer, but it wouldn’t open. Then I pulled the top one and it slid out smoothly. Inside lay a paper envelope and a tiny key. The handle of the key was shaped like the T around the keyhole, but the key was far too small to fit in the lock.

I tried anyway. It didn’t work.

“Maybe you have to turn the key sideways,” said Aaron.

I tried that. Then I tried putting the key in backward. Nothing worked. I picked up the envelope from the drawer and read the spidery writing on it out loud:

“What’s ‘grow powder’?” asked Aaron.

As soon as Aaron said that, I understood. “It’s to make the key grow!” I said. “You put grow powder on the key and it will grow until it fits the lock.”

“How do you know?”

“Why else would the key and the envelope be together?”

“That is so cool,” said Aaron. “We could sprinkle some on a Hot Wheels car. Then we could have our own cars.” We both
stared at the envelope in silence for a moment and thought about the possibilities of the grow powder. “Why does it say it has ‘deadly consequences’?”

“Well, what if it makes the key grow to five times its normal size?” I said. “Or ten times? Or what if you accidentally spilled some on a dog and it grew to the size of a horse?”

Aaron’s face went white. He hated dogs.

“That’s why we can’t open it now,” I said, slipping the tiny envelope back into the metal drawer. “We need to wait until we ’re way out in the middle of nowhere, where nothing bad like that could happen. Someplace safe.”

W
E NEEDED TO GET FAR AWAY
from civilization. Far away from dogs and cats and rats and other things that could grow big and dangerous. I talked to Dad at breakfast the next day.

“Don’t you think your poor, recovering son should get out of the house?”

Dad grunted and kept eating his cereal and reading the paper.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. “Think about all that time Mom spent alone with me. She probably needs a break, because I think I was driving her crazy.”

“What do you want, Josh?” Dad said, without raising his eyes from his paper.

“I was thinking it would be fun to go on a boys’ hiking trip this weekend.”

Dad looked up at me and said, “You’re right. That would be fun.”

After dinner that night, he packed our pickup with gear.

It didn’t turn out fun at all.

We were pulling the packs from our truck at the trailhead when a forest ranger walked up. His beard looked like the moss that hangs from old trees.

“How you doin’, folks?” he said cheerily.

“Fine,” muttered Dad. He hated seeing other people when we went hiking. “The whole reason you go hiking is to get away from other humans,” Dad always said. The sight of a single soda can or cigarette butt could ruin his whole weekend. If Dad spotted another hiker, he would walk straight ahead without a word, trying to pretend the person wasn’t there.

The ranger took Dad’s rudeness in stride. “Well, be sure you stay on the trail,” he said. “This is an awfully remote area. There’s no one to help if you get in trouble. Hardly ever come out here myself.”

“Good,” said Dad. He pulled the pack onto his back and walked up the trail. Aaron and I had to scramble to catch up.

It had taken us about six hours to drive to the trailhead from Tilton House in Tacoma. Now we were hiking toward a campsite in the Olympic National Forest, near the Dosewallips River and one of Grandpa’s favorite fishing spots.

One-hundred-foot-high cedar and fir trees cast the Olympic National Forest in shadow. Soggy, seaweed-colored moss hangs from the branches and droopy ferns cover the ground. At least, that’s how I remember it. I’ve never been back since that trip. I’ll never go back.

An hour later, we still hadn’t seen another sign of human life and Dad’s mood had improved. The trail was poorly marked and barely maintained, so every half hour we’d stop and Dad would check our progress on his trail map. Each time we took a break, I would take my pack off for a few minutes. I had the metal box hidden under my sleeping bag and it was heavy.

We walked for two hours until lunchtime. While Dad was fixing cheese sandwiches, I sat next to Aaron to firm up our plans.

“Tonight, as soon as Dad goes to sleep, we use the grow powder on the key,” I whispered.

“Does it have to be in the dark?” Aaron asked.

“Don’t be a baby.”

After lunch, we put in another four hours of steady hiking before Dad said we should set up camp. “With trees this tall and thick, it’ll get dark early.”

He pulled out his map again and studied the contour lines, looking for a likely spot. “That’s funny,” he said. “This next part of the map is blank.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look,” Dad said, pointing at the map. “We’re here. This red line marks the trail and all these curvy brown lines show the contour of the land. The closer they are together, the steeper the land is. But up around this little bend, the lines disappear.”

“Maybe it’s real flat there,” said Aaron. “That might be a good place to pitch our tent.”

“Maybe. Or it could be that they didn’t print that part of the map because no one has ever mapped it.”

“Well, the trail doesn’t go through it,” I said, “so if we stay on the trail, we should be fine.”

Dad looked at us gravely and put a hand on both of our shoulders. “Josh, Aaron, I think you’re missing something. What we have here is an opportunity. We ’ve stumbled upon uncharted territory. Not much of that left these days. Nearly every square inch of this earth has been tromped over, littered upon, photographed, documented, and generally soaked in the stench of human activity. Now, it could just be that this map is a bad printout, but it’s also possible that we have found a few acres of land no one has ever mapped before. Maybe no one has ever even set foot on it. Think of it. This may be the only chance in our lives to step into the unknown.”

“The ranger said we should stay on the trail,” said Aaron.

“Sure he did. And that’s good advice, too. Stay on the trail. Play it safe. Turn your back on your chance for discovery. That’s what we should probably do. Right, boys?”

“Right!” said Aaron enthusiastically. I nodded.

“Noooo! No, no, no! You’re not getting it!” Dad shouted, waving his arms around and pacing up and down the trail. “Forget the trail. Forget the dadblamed map! We ’re striking out on our own. ‘O brave new world’ and all that! Tonight, we camp in a new land! Come on!”

What could we do? We followed Dad around a bend in the trail until, according to the map, the uncharted territory was directly to our left. If that part of the land had never been mapped, I could see why. Bushes and nettles and brambles covered it so densely, it looked like it would take a bulldozer to cut through it. But Dad didn’t hesitate. He stepped over the stinging nettles and plowed into the bushes.

After fifteen minutes, we were still barely fifty feet from the trail. Thorns caught our clothes and scratched our skin. Thick
branches blocked our path, and the farther we went, the soggier the ground got. Finally, the underbrush thinned and the bushes gave way to huge ferns and leggy rhododendrons. The ground was still soggy, but it rose just ahead. If we climbed up that hill, Dad said, we would probably reach drier ground.

We made it to the top of the hill and stopped. Dad whistled. “Wow,” Aaron said. I agreed. Wow. We were looking at one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen.

Aaron named it the Mossy Spot and we claimed it on behalf of Tilton House.

The Mossy Spot consisted of a clearing about four times as wide as our tent, ringed by ancient-looking Douglas fir trees. Everything in the clearing was smothered in thick emerald moss. Everything. There were no bare patches and no other plants—only moss. The moss grew about twenty feet up the trees. It grew over every bump on the ground, large or small. It was so green that I kind of wanted to take a bite to see what it tasted like.

“
This
is where we are camping tonight,” said Dad.

At that moment, I was glad we’d left the trail. As I stared at this untouched morsel of the world, all the scratches on my arms from plowing through the brush didn’t matter.