Every House Is Haunted (34 page)

“
Joey!
” Tad called. “
Get out of there!
”

Joey turned to Tad, dropped the sticks in his hand, and ran screaming after Hexxy. Into the woods.

The woods.

The wood.

Tad ran over and picked up one of Joey’s sticks. Dennis had managed to free his other arm, and was now looking at the kids running helter-skelter across the school grounds.
Fast food
, Tad thought crazily. He had to hurry before this really did turn into a bloodbath.

He gripped the stick tightly and raised it high over his head. “
Dennis! Over here, boy!
”

Whatever metamorphosis the demon had undergone, it still recognized the voice of its master. Its eyes (there were eight of them now) regarded Tad with alacrity.

“
Open wide!
”

Dennis opened his mouth. Tad threw the stick. It tumbled through the air, end over end, and even before it had left his hand, Tad knew he had thrown too high. It went over Dennis’s still-changing head, missing his mouth completely . . .
and landed in one of the demon’s extra hands.

He stuffed it into his mouth and swallowed it without fanfare.

Tad tossed the rest of the sticks and Dennis ate them as well. By the time Mr. Farley had regained consciousness, Dennis had devoured three of the trees on the edge of the woods and was halfway through his fourth.

Farley thanked Tad for saving his life and the life of Tad’s classmates. Then he disqualified Dennis for eating one of the other contestants. First prize went to Tart Williams and her oven-cleaning octopod. Tad didn’t mind much. Mr. Farley had helped him to see the positive side of not being expelled from Blackloch for bringing a dangerous demon onto its grounds. Tad saw it very well.

His parents let him keep the Tattletail. Tad didn’t tell them about the incident at the talent show, only that he had lost; he suspected it was their feeling sorry for him that prompted them to let him keep the demon.

Tad kept Dennis on a wood diet—
All that you can chop
, his father told him brightly—and he soon developed a smooth oaken coat. Once a week Tad polished him with Pledge.

His dad no longer complained about the smell.

Morris Hardy was standing in his front yard watching the delivery truck with
SHARF ELECTRONICS
on the side back into his driveway when Eddie Giles came over.

“Hey, neighbour. How’s it hangin’?”

Eddie was wearing a plaid bathrobe and moose-slipper ensemble that might have been stolen off a homeless person. He was holding a coffee cup with
TEACHERS DO IT EIGHT MONTHS OF THE YEAR
printed on the side. Eddie taught history at the community college—a fact that confirmed to Morris that education in this country was going right down the toilet.

He and Eddie had been living next to each other on Alder Lane for two years—two years that, to Morris, felt more like ten—and at some point during that time Eddie had come to the debatable conclusion that he and Morris were best friends.

“Hi, Eddie,” Morris said. “I thought you were headed up to Groverton this morning.”

“We’re leaving this aft.” Eddie scratched himself with his free hand and yawned. “Kim’s got morning classes. You can’t believe how much I miss that kid.”

Morris nodded even though he was pretty sure Eddie’s daughter didn’t reciprocate the feeling. Kim had escaped to university the previous fall, and, after landing a waitressing job at a seafood restaurant, had stayed on through the summer. She had been home to visit only twice. Watching her father openly scratching his balls through his bathrobe, Morris understood completely.

“Tell Kim that Jude and I say hello,” he said.

“Will do,” Eddie said distractedly. He was staring at the truck.

That, Morris realized, was what had lured Eddie from his fortress of suburban solitude. Here in the ’burbs, the arrival of a delivery truck was to adults what the arrival of the ice-cream truck was to kids. As if to further prove this truth, Morris spied a curtain open at the house across the street, and a face peek out.

The truck stopped and two men in brown coveralls climbed out. One of them had a clipboard with a piece of yellow flimsy attached to it.

“Mr. Hardy?”

Eddie slapped Morris on the back. “He’s your man.”

The deliveryman gave Eddie a passing look and handed the clipboard to Morris. As he signed, the other deliveryman pulled up the rear door of the truck and started shimmying out a large cardboard box—the widescreen television Morris had wanted for years but had only recently been able to afford. Jude had tried to kick up a fuss, but she couldn’t come up with any specific reasons against the purchase. Morris knew she was sore because he hadn’t consulted her before placing the order. But the way he saw it, if they had to move out of the city—against his own wishes—then he should be allowed to take the necessary measures to make himself comfortable.

Morris returned the clipboard and the deliveryman tore off his copy.

“I knew you were getting a new toy,” Eddie said slyly.

“How’d you guess?” Morris said, going along.

“The dish,” Eddie said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Morris’s roof. The new satellite dish gleamed in the early-morning light. “That’s a hell of an antenna, too. You get Skinemax on that?”

Morris nodded even though he wasn’t really listening. He was watching the deliverymen. They were speaking in low, furtive voices. A moment later one of them came over and said, “Uh, Mr. Hardy, I’m afraid we have a bit of a problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well.” The man took off his hat and raked his fingers through his greasy hair. “It appears we left the cart back at the store. And we need it to—”

“Couldn’t we just carry it in?” Eddie piped.

The deliveryman looked at Eddie, then turned to Morris with a questioning look. “Well . . . we
could
carry it. It’s not so much heavy as it is awkward. But . . .”

Morris understood what the other man was trying to say:
Yes, it
could
be done. But do you really want to put your new toy in this guy’s hands?

He looked at Eddie, trying to see past the patchy robe and grungy moose slippers. He didn’t hate Eddie, but he felt something, and irritation seemed too small a word to describe his feelings for a man who punctuated his every accident with the word “oopsie.” As in,
The other day I was in the front yard taking a few test swings with my new five iron and—oopsie!—now I need to replace the windshield on the Subaru.

There had been an oopsie just a month ago, in fact, on a Sunday afternoon when the couples had gotten together for a barbecue. Eddie had manoeuvred Morris’s new hibachi next to the hedge wall that separated their backyards—
to give it some shade
, was Eddie’s oblique explanation—and a large section of it had caught fire. Morris would never forget the expression on Eddie’s face that day, a look of complete and total perplexity that seemed to say,
Damn, were those things flammable?

If Eddie helped carry the television, the odds were there would be an accident (an oopsie, if you like). But with the deliverymen helping . . . and it only had to go into the house . . .

“Okay,” Morris said finally. “Let’s do it.”

The deliverymen used the hydraulic lifter to lower the box to the driveway, and when everyone was ready, each man took a corner and lifted with an enthusiastic grunt. To his surprise, Morris found himself to be the weakest link. While Eddie and the two deliverymen hoisted their quarter of the box effortlessly, Morris struggled to keep his off the ground. His arms began to tremble, and he finally had to set his corner back down. It wasn’t heavy, as the deliveryman had said, but he felt inexplicably drained.

“Jude keep you up last night?” Eddie chortled.

Morris couldn’t see Eddie’s face over the top of the box, but he could picture his sly grin quite easily. He took a deep, cleansing breath, shook his arms to loosen his muscles, and said, “Okay, let’s try it again.”

The box wouldn’t fit through the front door, so they brought it around to the back of the house. Walking up the short set of steps to the deck, Eddie stepped on one of Jude’s potted azaleas, pulverizing it. As he watched Eddie shake the dirt off his tacky slipper, Morris had a sudden, brief image of Godzilla wearing a plaid bathrobe and laying waste to Tokyo, punctuating each cataclysmic footfall with—

“Oopsie,” Eddie said, smiling sheepishly.

Morris closed his eyes and took another deep, steadying breath.

They carried the box through the sliding glass door and into the dining room. Eddie tracked dirt on the carpet. They passed through the kitchen, guiding the box around the refrigerator and the dishwasher, and came to a stop at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement.

Morris leaned against the doorway, breathing heavily. He looked at Eddie and thought,
If you have an oopsie going down these stairs, you’ll be wearing this thing like a hat.
But it was Morris who was huffing and puffing and hunched over with his hands on his knees. If anyone was going to have any oopsie, it was probably going to be him.

But there was no oopsie. It was slow moving the box down the tight confines of the stairway, but they made it without incident, setting the box on the clean patch of carpet where Morris’s old television had recently held court.

Everyone stood around catching their breath. Morris needed more time than anyone else. He leaned against the doorway that communicated between the den and the laundry room, his face as red as a cooked lobster, sweat rolling down his cheeks like tears. One of the deliverymen offered to get him a canister of oxygen from the truck, and everyone had a chuckle over that.

When the deliverymen had gone and Eddie had wandered back to his own house, Morris returned to the den and began the business of setting up his new television.

He loved the den. It was his place. He had installed shelves on one entire wall to accommodate his extensive DVD library. Framed movie posters—as beautiful as any work of art, in his opinion—graced every wall. Tall Bose speakers stood like sentinels in each of the room’s four corners. A glass-fronted cabinet held his DVD player and stereo system. The only furniture was a leather couch and a recliner, both of which had been strategically positioned to take full advantage of the surround-sound system, thereby ensuring a true theatre-going experience. Jude referred to the den as his shrine to the great god Hollywood.

As he was admiring the setup of television, sound system, and furniture, like megaliths in some postmodern Stonehenge, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye, near one of the speakers.

It was a spider, a little grey one, constructing a web in the corner near the ceiling.

Morris picked up a copy of
Entertainment Weekly
, rolled it into a tube, and made to brush away the web.

Then he remembered the crickets.

They had moved in sometime around the start of the summer. He didn’t remember exactly when because they didn’t bother him, but Jude started to complain about their incessant chirping. She claimed to hear them all through the house, though Morris was fairly certain they were located somewhere in the laundry room. That Morris couldn’t hear them in any place except the den didn’t matter. According to Jude, he usually had the volume turned up so loud he wouldn’t have heard World War III even if the first nukes landed on Alder Lane.