RARE BEASTS (2 page)

Each had two words painted in big white block letters, one word on each side. If you were traveling the length of Florence Boulevard, each bridge added another word to a message, and the message was different depending on which direction you were traveling. From east to west, the roofs read
WELCOME FRIEND TO NOD’S LIMBS STAY AWHILE
. From west to east they said
COME BACK SOON FRIEND AND TAKE CARE
. However, since you could enter Nod’s Limbs from the west as easily as from the east, and leave in either direction as well, sometimes these messages made sense and sometimes they didn’t. But though you might be wished
WELCOME
as you left and greeted with
COME BACK SOON
as you entered, the residents of Nod’s Limbs didn’t mind because they thought it looked quaint.

But no matter how respectable a town is, when it’s large enough, it usually develops what the locals call the “right side of town” and the “wrong side of town.”

The “right side of town” is where the honest, hardworking citizens live. The streets are clean, the
lawns are manicured, and people walk around with smiles on their faces and a kind word for their neighbors. On the “wrong side of town,” however, people don’t look each other in the eye when passing in the street. It’s where the disreputable people live, such as those who would deface public property—those who would take the sweet greetings of their town and alter them to say mean things like
WELCOME FIENDS TO SMELLY NOD’S LIMBS DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS
and
DON’T COME BACK HERE EVER EVER EVER
. The streets here are covered in trash and dirt, and the houses are dark, dilapidated, and terribly unpleasant.

Nod’s Limbs was large enough to have a “right side” and a “wrong side,” and you might think that both “sides” of the town would be about the same size. Not so in Nod’s Limbs.

“An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” was the credo of most of the town’s citizens, and because of this dedication, just about the whole of Nod’s Limbs could be considered the “right side.”

All, that is, except for one small block on the far end of town.

If you walked south through Nod’s Limbs, past the parks and trees and row after row of well-kept houses, past the zoo and the high school and the hospital, and finally past the solemn green hills of the Nod’s Limbs Cemetery, you’d come to Ricketts Road.

Ricketts Road ran along the edge of the Black Tree Forest Preserve from the east end of town to the west. It was a charming two-lane road, and the Nod’s Limbs Maintenance Department did an admirable job of keeping the pavement clean and the roadside vegetation trimmed.

However, just past where the back of the cemetery met Ricketts Road, there was a turnoff for a narrow little lane that was never touched by the Maintenance Department. The lane had no name, or at least no street sign, and it was badly in need of a new layer of tar. The broken, weed-choked pavement made walking hazardous and driving treacherous, so it was very rarely traveled.

The lane came to a dead end in front of a very tall, very narrow house that rose so far into the sky that you could fall over backward trying to see the top of it. Two high, arched windows gave the impression
that the imposing structure was watching you, and above them the house was capped with a dark cupola with wrought-iron spikes reaching skyward and a small round window in the center that looked like a mystical third eye.

And the color! Or, more to the point, the lack of color! There was one word for this place, and that was
gray
. Everything on the house was some shade of gray, from the bottommost stones to the tips of the spikes jutting up from the roof. The worn wood trim on the doors and windows was such a deep and heavy gray that it was almost black, and the slate shingles looked like the
inside of an abandoned furnace. A few broken shutters dangled from their hinges, swaying back and forth, caught in the wind that gusted continually about the tall building.

And if you came close to the house, right up to the front steps, you’d be able to read the one strange word carved in stone above the door. In neat, chiseled letters, such as those you might find on a gravestone, it said:

A funny-sounding word with a rather unfunny meaning,
schadenfreude
means “pleasure derived from the misery of others,” and it was a fitting motto for those who lived there.

And, perhaps, it served as a warning for curious passersby, as well.

Looming over the landscape and casting a long shadow, this mansion rarely drew anyone close enough to read the word carved above the door. The house was so ornate and eye-catching that it might have been beautiful had someone
else
lived there. Had someone
else
lived there, with a fresh coat of paint and a petunia border around the lawn, it might have been bright and welcoming and the most popular house in town.

Alas, someone else did not live there.
Two
someone elses lived there: Edgar and his sister, Ellen. These two were not just brother and sister—they were twins, and should just one of them be trouble, then two most certainly would be double that. And just one was very troublesome indeed.

“The garden’s growing high, Sister.”
“Time to tear the petals off the roses, Brother!”

The twins were tall and scrawny, with black hair matted flat to their heads. Ellen’s limp pigtails dangled past her pointy chin, while Edgar’s hair was all one short length, except for the few strands that stuck straight up in the back. Both had pale, angular faces and wide, bulging eyes.

They wore matching one-piece, striped footie pajamas, with flaps on the seat that were handy when they needed to use the lavatory. The old, worn-in pajamas were very comfortable, and the twins kept them on all the time. What were once red and white stripes were now a stained and dingy rust and gray.

Their skills in the art of mischief were impressive and long-studied, having begun twelve years earlier in the womb. Although they were twins, Ellen was technically older by two minutes and thirteen seconds.

Oh, the fight the two of them put up to see who would enter the world first!

Their mother suffered hours upon hours of pain in the hospital delivery room as they punched and kicked each other inside her. Ellen must have edged out Edgar, because she finally emerged first, miniature fists held high in victory celebration. Edgar came soon after, and when the nurses first held up the twins side-by-side for their mother and father to see, Edgar took his tiny finger and poked Ellen in the eye.

One day near the end of summer, Ellen examined her garden through a grimy window and saw that it was wilting nicely in the muggy, late-morning heat. She hadn’t watered any of the plants or fed the fanged orchids in weeks, and the foliage had a pleasing droop, as if the plants might reach the ground and try to crawl toward nourishment and shelter. There was no need for Ellen to go out, as she had planned, to prune the hemlocks. So while most of Nod’s Limbs’ younger citizens were splashing in pools or frolicking by the river, Edgar and Ellen stayed inside their dark house, playing a game of hide-and-seek.

The twins’ home had many floors including a subbasement, a basement, an attic, and an attic-above-the-attic. Although the house was so narrow that each floor had only two or three rooms, there were still an awful lot of them. Each room was full of cupboards and closets and couches and curtains and enough grubby cubbyholes to hide in for an entire summer’s worth of hide-and-seek.

Edgar and Ellen’s parents had long since departed on an extended “around the world” holiday. At least
that’s what it said on the note they’d left behind. With no one to clean it, the vast house had accumulated a rich collection of cobwebs and dust balls, providing the perfect setting for their game, to which they added their own unique twist.

In a typical game of hide-and-seek, the game ends once one player discovers where another is hiding. Well, Edgar and Ellen’s version didn’t end by merely
finding
the hider. The game ended when the hider was
subdued
, which meant that the seeker first had to uncover the hiding place and then had to wrestle the hider to the ground. Subduing could be quite a struggle since the twins knew each other’s wrestling moves, and the game generally concluded with either the hider or the seeker bound hand and foot, tied up in the ropes they both routinely carried.

Of course, once one twin was trussed up, he or she had lost and was at the mercy of the winner, and the winner always made sure to show as little mercy as possible before darting off to find a new hiding spot, leaving the loser to struggle free.

Ellen was adept at using her teeth and sharply filed nails to cut through her bonds, and Edgar had practiced the deliberate methods of famous escape artists. Nevertheless, it usually took each sibling over
an hour to work free of the ropes. And an hour is plenty of time to find a great hiding place.

Ellen was in the library, wedged into a shallow compartment behind an ugly oil painting—a rotting still life of moldy cabbage and eggs. She felt cramped and restless in the tiny alcove.

“What’s taking Edgar so long?” she thought, wondering why she couldn’t have picked a larger hiding place. “Curse that slow brother of mine, always checking every possible spot on every floor, even ones we’ve already used!”

Suddenly, she heard the somber tones of the house’s pipe organ waft up from a parlor on the seventh floor. Edgar was playing a military march.

“Argh! Not again!” Ellen wailed, covering her ears.

But Ellen’s grimace turned into a smile as she ran her fingers over the edge of the strange item she’d brought with her, a surprise she thought her brother might appreciate.

Finally, the cacophony ended and a slight gust of chilly air tingled the hairs on the back of Ellen’s
neck. She knew Edgar had entered the library. He had tracked her there after nearly two hours of searching, although he might have arrived sooner had he not run into all the booby traps she had rigged. He had managed to avoid the oil slick on the second-floor landing, but the trip wires laced through the fourth and fifth floors had taken some time to disarm, and a falling bucket in the kitchen had nearly given him a good knock on the head.

Ellen watched from a gap between the frame and the wall as her twin checked behind drapes and under chairs. When Edgar turned to examine a massive mahogany desk, she carefully swung the painting outward, climbed down to the dusty carpet, and crept up behind him.