Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (4 page)

"Very sound reasoning," the professor said. "You should come and teach in my college."

"Wouldn't I have to graduate first?" Molly asked.

"Yes. They have all these silly rules," the professor said.

I was having a hard time remembering that I was taking a walk with two officially crazy people. From my limited experience passing between planes of existence, the things they were talking about didn't sound particularly insane—on the other hand, the professor was wearing a dress made out of curtains from some room in the mental hospital and had spent a good part of his life seeking vengeance on some guy who had sold his father a toy that he thought didn't work, and earlier Molly had been telling me about a house where people swing from trapezes with chimpanzeeses.

"What are your views on interstellar travel and alien species?" the professor asked Molly.

"Well, given that there are untold billions of stars in the universe, stars like our sun, any of which might have planets, and some incredibly large number of those might have conditions conducive to life, I'm of the opinion it is a dead cert that we are not alone.
Of course, it's hard to get all this stuff to behave in my head, because of being deranged, you know."

"You should read my book
Are Flying Saucers from New Jersey?
" the professor said.

"Are they?" I asked.

"Well, I thought they might be when I wrote it," the professor said. "But now I think possibly not. But I am certain one of the main points where lots of them come together is the airspace above Poughkeepsie."

"I know I've seen plenty of them," Molly said.

"Oh, they're up there, all right," the professor said. "And the genius of it is, who would think of looking for them here? People all have the idea that if you want to see UFOs you have to go out in the western desert."

"I've never seen any flying saucers," I said.

"That's because you're always in that bookshop," the professor said. "And a flying saucer bookshop at that. But anyone who has lived here for any length of time has seen them. Here! I'll ask this passerby. You there! Yokel! Have you ever seen a flying saucer?"

A guy in overalls was walking along the road. "Who wants to know?" he asked.

"Just a seeker after truth," the professor said. "Now fess up. Have you noticed any lights in the sky?"

"Quite often, especially on Wednesdays," the guy said. "And I've seen them land behind the old stone barn."

"There you are! The voice of the people! Thank you, my good man."

"Escaping from the nut farm, are you?" the stranger asked.

"Just for the afternoon," the professor said. "The old stone barn, you say?"

"Just down the road," the local said. "Have a nice day!"

The way we were going was down a road with tidy houses, trees, and yards on both sides. Like a lot of streets in Poughkeepsie, it had once been all farmland, and in some places we could see past the houses to cultivated fields. It was easy to see that the old stone barn was built before the houses—it looked hundreds of years old. And it was stone, and it was a barn, and it had a sign on it that read
OLD STONE BARN
, and another one that read
COCA-COLA
, and a blackboard on which was written "Apple Fritters."

Sometimes as you go from one place to another, step into a room or out a door, you suddenly get a mental picture of how you might appear to someone seeing you for the first time. As we entered the
small lunchroom that took up a corner of the old stone barn, I got a flash of the three of us: a tiny girl with a strange, crazy gaze, a gray-bearded old man in a makeshift dress, and a tall girl with pussycat whiskers. We must have been fairly noteworthy. But there were no customers in the place to take note—just the proprietor.

Behind the counter was a tremendously fat woman with a hairnet and a red face. "Apple fritters?" she asked, looking at Professor Tag.

"Apple fritters!" the professor said.

Then she looked at Molly. "Apple fritters?"

"Um..."

"Apple fritters?"

"I have money," I whispered to Molly. "It's my treat."

"Apple fritters?"

"Well, I..."

"Apple fritters?!?" the fat, red-faced, hairneted woman shouted.

"Apple fritters!" Molly shouted back.

Then she looked at me. "Apple fritters?" she hollered at the top of her voice.

"Apple fritters!" I screamed.

"Apple fritters!" the woman yelled, and hustled into the kitchen to make them.

We took seats along the counter.

"You know, I bet she sells a lot of apple fritters for a little neighborhood place like this," Professor Tag said.

The woman reappeared and banged a plateful of apple fritters with powdered sugar on top down in front of each of us.

"Coffee?" she yelled.

"COFFEE!" all three of us yelled back as loud as we could.

"COFFEE!" the woman shouted. Then, with a big smile on her red face, she drew three mugs of coffee from a big percolator and banged them down on the counter, one, two, three.

The apple fritters were delicious.

The coffee was fragrant and creamy and hot.

"I was conversing with a bumpkin just now," Professor Tag said to the apple fritter woman. "He said he has seen flying saucers in this vicinity."

"They land in the back," the woman said. "My apple fritters have an interplanetary reputation."

"What, the space men come in for fritters?"

"Space men and space women. I thought you three might be some of them at first."

"Ah. Is that why you stuck to one expression—'apple fritters'?"

"Some of them don't know a lot of English."

Now, it is a fact that even if you have worked out logically that the odds are vastly in favor of life on other planets, even if you have had experience that supports the idea that travel between worlds is not only possible but common, and even if you have actually seen or otherwise had personal experience of spacecraft or flying saucers, when someone else claims to have had an encounter your first thought is to check out whether they are crazy.

"I am Professor Tag," Professor Tag said. "I am interested in flying saucers."

"I am Clarinda Quackenboss," the fritter woman said. "I am interested in making the best apple fritters in the galaxy."

"When do 'they' tend to stop by?"

"Could be anytime. Sometimes they are around all the time, and sometimes I don't see any for months. But usually it's at night, and for some reason usually Wednesdays."

"Could we examine the area where they land?"

"Help yourselves. It's out back," Clarinda Quackenboss said.

In order to get to the back we had to go out of the little lunchroom, and back through the main door and through the old stone barn. It was dark and musty, and there was a disgusting smell.

"What is that disgusting smell?" I asked.

"It smells like about a hundred male cats," Molly said.

"And bats. There are lots of bats here," Professor Tag said. "Look! You can see the little sweeties hanging from the rafters, having their daytime sleep."

"Where are the cats?" I asked. "I don't see them, just smell them."

"Maybe the bats ate them," Molly said.

"Bats don't eat cats. Other way around, if anything," the professor said.

We gulped fresh air when we came out the back door of the old stone barn.

"Let's look around," the professor said.

"What are we looking for?"

"I don't know. Some kind of evidence that saucers have landed here."

"And what kind of place is this?"

I had been sort of expecting an old run-down farm, but this was not that. There were wide lawns, and a driveway leading to a big, strange-looking house a long way off. There were huge trees bordering the driveway on both sides. These trees were like nothing I had ever seen. Their trunks were thick and twisted, with smooth gray bark and weird bulges. The branches were skinny and angular, and bent this way and that, and the roots above the ground were fat and bulbouslooking, like old feet with bunions. The leaves were shiny and metallic-looking, and they shimmered and rustled in the breeze. I had the feeling that the trees towering over us were looking down at us. Somehow they looked as though they could pick up their bulbous roots and walk. They were like ... intelligent trees! And a little scary and maybe evil.

"It's an old estate," Professor Tag said. "And these are the biggest, oldest, weirdest beech trees I have ever seen."

"Beech trees? Is that what they are?"

"Yes, copper beeches, and some other varieties I don't recognize. They have to be way over a hundred years old."

"Professor, do you get the feeling these trees know we're here?"

"They're very old trees," the professor said. "They may have developed some kind of consciousness in all their years. And they may not be the only ones who know we're here."

I didn't understand what the professor meant at first. Then I saw someone approaching us.

It was a tall old lady with gray hair piled up on her head, wearing a dress not unlike Professor Tag's.

"How do you do?" the professor said. "I am Professor Tag, on temporary leave from the college while insane, and these ladies are Audrey and Molly. Clarinda Quackenboss, the apple fritter lady, said it would be all right for us to come back here and have a look around."

The old lady stood very straight, with her hands folded. She had gray eyes and very pale skin. "I am
Alexandra Van Dood," she said. "You are welcome to look. Do you know where you are?"

"I do and I don't," Professor Tag said. "Clearly this is a very old estate, at least two hundred years old. The beech trees are of remarkable age and size. The mansion is of Dutch design, very large and grand—it must be a famous house. But I have lived in this county and city all my life, and I am a scholar, yet I never knew it was here! Madame Van Dood, will you tell me the name of this house?"

"This is Spookhuizen," Alexandra Van Dood said.

"What? This is Spookhuizen?" The professor was excited. "Of course I have heard of it, but I did not know it still existed—or that it ever existed. This is Spookhuizen, the ancient seat of the Van Vliegende and Van Schotel families?"

"Yes, this is the Vliegende-Schotel mansion," the old lady said.

"And is it haunted, as the stories tell?" the professor asked.

"Oh, it is most haunted," Madame Van Dood said. "Most haunted."

We looked down the avenue of tortured-looking trees. The house was big and dark, and the windows were dark. It was covered with cedar shingles that had turned black over the centuries and had a silvery
sheen like the leaves of the beeches. The shadows under the porches were the blackest black. It didn't seem to me like a place in which I would want to set foot in broad daylight, and at night you couldn't pay me to go in.

"We will have to come back here sometime at night," the professor said, causing me to remember he was crazy.

"If you will excuse me, I must go now," Alexandra Van Dood said.

And then she was gone! We looked around in all directions but could not see her going away. But here is the funny thing: I thought I saw a big white owl flitting through the beech trees, Molly thought she saw a white horse galloping over the lawn, and the professor thought he saw a white mouse scurrying through the grass.