The Tell-Tale Start (4 page)

THE
morning after being expelled, Allan and Edgar lingered over the Denver omelets Aunt Judith set out at breakfast.

Afterward, they played with their black cat, Roderick Usher, whom their mom and dad had brought home as a kitten just two weeks before the launching pad accident that claimed their lives. Roderick meant everything to Edgar and Allan. (It didn’t hurt that he was probably the smartest cat in the world.)

When Roderick retreated for a morning nap, curling into a ball that concealed the furry white figure eight
on his chest, the twins turned their attention to a few of the household projects they’d had to put off for the past few weeks.

First they made precise measurements of the shadowy, oddly shaped rooms on the top floor of the large white clapboard house that had been in the Poe family almost back to the days of their famous great-great-great-great granduncle.

They used the measurements to draft a detailed architectural drawing that they hoped would reveal some unaccounted-for space between the rooms, which might indicate a hidden chamber. Who knew what such a chamber might contain?

But no such luck.

Why would anyone build a house like this without a secret
room
? they wondered, frustrated by some nineteenth-century architect’s lack of imagination.

It was a good thing they had other projects.

Next, they went to the attic, tethering themselves like mountaineers to a crossbeam, and climbed out the small window and onto the steeply angled roof. From here, they enjoyed a good view of the whole neighborhood, though that wasn’t the reason they were there. Edgar held a heavy lead ball the size of a baseball. Allan held a lighter lead ball the size of a golfball. The twins had customized each ball with its own built-in stopwatch. Cautiously, they ventured to the edge of the roof and looked straight down into the backyard.

It was a long drop.

In a famous experiment, the sixteenth-century Italian scientist Galileo had dropped cannon balls of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to prove the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s theory of motion wrong. Now, Edgar and Allan wondered if they might redeem Aristotle’s reputation with new evidence (might some phenomenon of quantum physics have altered the fabric of the universe since Galileo’s time?).

“One, two, three,” they said in unison, dropping the balls.

After climbing back through the window and untethering themselves, they raced downstairs to check the results.

No luck. The speeds proved identical—Galileo remained right. The twins had suspected as much, but it would have been nice to make history. Poor Aristotle.

Still, they didn’t lose heart.

Instead, they went into the garden to pick asters.

Returning to their uncle Jack’s study, they placed the flowers between the pages of two old leather-bound books, flattening the petals. The twins’ hypothesis was that a flower pressed in a book of Shakespearean tragedies would fade in color more quickly than one pressed in a book of Shakespearean comedies. They knew it was a long shot. And that it would take months or even years to determine. But they believed in the scientific method.

“Lunchtime!” their aunt called.

It had been a busy morning, but by the time the twins were seated again at the kitchen table, their thoughts had turned from their experiments to the well-being of
their classmates. Who would secretly reprogram the GPS on the school bus next week so that the seventh grade would “accidentally” arrive at a miniature golf course rather than at the sewage plant for their planned (boring) field trip?
If not us, then who
? the boys wondered.

“What’s wrong?” Aunt Judith asked.

“Now that we’re gone, there’s nobody looking out for the kids at school,” said Allan.

“Oh, your friends will survive,” Aunt Judith assured them as she set out their lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple slices, and snickerdoodles. “The real problem is what we’re going to do to educate you two.”

“Maybe it’s time we went to Harvard,” Edgar suggested.

“I don’t think being expelled is the sort of recommendation that Harvard’s looking for,” she answered.

“Then how about if you teach us, Aunt Judith?” Allan asked. “Here at home.”

She stopped chewing, letting the words sink in. “What a lovely thought. You know…yes, that could work.”

“Or we could go to Yale,” Allan added.

Aunt Judith laughed and shook her head. “Why don’t you boys go outside and spend some time with your friends?”

“It’s lunchtime. Our friends are all in school.”

“Doesn’t the high school get out early today?”

“Well, yes, but…”

There were some things Allan and Edgar didn’t talk about with their aunt and uncle. They avoided topics that were too brainy—for example, dead languages or advanced mathematics or the microbiology of hummingbirds. Nobody could keep up with the twins when it came to such things. And, more important, they avoided any personal topics that might make their guardians feel helpless or sad, keeping quiet about situations they determined were best taken care of by themselves. Things like this:

Many of the older kids were
very
unkind to the Poe twins.

It had been going on for years. Every time the bullies in the neighborhood saw Allan and Edgar, they sang out, “Gruesome twosome, gruesome twosome,” pointing and making faces. At first, the boys didn’t mind too much. After all, they
were
a twosome, and (as far as they were concerned) there were worse things to be than gruesome. But the lack of originality in the rhyme—“gruesome/twosome”—eventually grated on their literary sensibilities. As poetry, it left a lot to be desired. A
first-grader could have done better. And there were even less imaginative names:

The twins knew they were unusual. But what else would they want to be—usual?

Still, it was aggravating.

More recently, “anonymous” kids who left size 11 and 12 footprints in the flower beds had begun to ring the Poes’ doorbell every night at the stroke of midnight (neither their aunt nor uncle heard it, because they both wore earplugs to bed). Only after Edgar and Allan wired the ringer to shock anyone who pressed it after 11 p.m. did the prank fall out of fashion.

Next, kids in the same size 11 and 12 shoes toilet-papered the elm tree in the front yard of the Poe house. Not once or twice, but three times. And they’d have continued if Edgar and Allan hadn’t connected the sprinkler system to a motion detector they switched on every night before bed.

“On second thought, maybe you ought to stay away from those older boys,” Aunt Judith said.

Had she heard some neighborhood talk about the bullies?

She lowered her voice, as if sharing a secret. “Mrs. Ward told me she thinks they’re planning to cause even more trouble this Halloween than they did last year.”

Worse than last year?

The boys put down their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Last Halloween, the gang had not only egged ten parked cars and stomped to pieces countless carefully carved jack-o’-lanterns but they had also terrorized dozens of little kids who were trick-or-treating, knocking them down and stealing their bags of candy.

This had to be stopped.

Edgar and Allan determined then and there to head off the bullying by exposing these thugs for what they truly were—cowards. To shame them into submission. And now that the twins were temporarily out of school, they had time enough to pull it off. But how? They considered, two minds acting as one.

The bullies needed to be taught a lesson…

Halloween was this Monday…

The Poe family’s old house might be made very spooky indeed…

In past years, Allan and Edgar had decorated the front porch for Halloween. This year, they had something more ambitious in mind. They assured Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith that it would all be good fun and that they’d take care of everything themselves—and clean up afterward.

The next afternoon, Edgar and Allan distributed to the smirking clan a hand-lettered, blood-red invitation that read:

Then they set to work.

Monday night, when the battalion of bullies arrived, Edgar and Allan met them on the porch costumed in
funereal shrouds and disguised by corpselike masks daubed with what appeared to be blood—twin versions of the frightening medieval harbinger of doom in their great-great-great-great granduncle’s story “The Masque of the Red Death.” The two phantoms silently beckoned with rotting fingers toward the front door, allowing their “guests” to enter the house only one at a time.

That’s when the fun began.

In the entryway, each bully immediately had to drop to his hands and knees to avoid a huge, swinging scythe that
looked
as if it could take a boy’s head clean off.

And it only got worse from there.

Next, each had to crawl through a dark, narrow passage that Edgar and Allan had constructed from fitted
rubber sewer pipe. The slimy creatures that felt like worms actually
were
worms, bought at a local bait shop. In the dark, the writhing worms felt extra squishy. Mixed among the worms were long, tangled strands of intestines, mushy lungs and livers, stomach linings, softball-sized hearts, gooey kidneys, and assorted exotic animal glands that the boys had retrieved from refuse bins at a sausage factory near the harbor.