The Tell-Tale Start (5 page)

The passage wound through the entryway, across the sitting room, and finally to the basement stairs, which were invisible in the darkness. The unsuspecting older boys tumbled screaming, one by one, into the basement, which Edgar and Allan had turned into a medieval dungeon.

There, recorded bursts of thunder crashed in sync with lightning flashes, while bloodcurdling shrieks filled the air. Authentic-looking ghostly apparitions appeared, some headless and bloody. And scariest of all, there was no visible exit. The boys’ guests could do nothing but scramble around like bugs in a jar. Meanwhile, the younger neighborhood kids, some of the boys’ classmates, and their friend Stevie “The Hulk” Harrison gathered upstairs, gleefully watching it all on a closed-circuit TV.

Happy Halloween.

Ordinarily, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith would never have allowed such mayhem, but with all of the recorded sound effects echoing around the neighborhood, they never imagined that the screaming in their basement was real. Besides, the boys eventually released their captives, none of whom had actually been hurt.

Sure, all of them had wet their pants. But what was Halloween for if not to scare the pee out of a few bullies?

Especially if it embarrassed them enough that they didn’t show their faces on the street for the rest of the night.

None of the neighborhood’s trick-or-treaters was robbed of candy, all the jack-o’-lanterns made it through the night, and nobody had to scrub streaks of egg off their windows or cars.

Best of all, the bullies learned an important lesson about themselves…and Edgar and Allan.

“There’ll be no more dungeons for you two!” Uncle Jack said when he learned how far they had gone to terrify.

The twins didn’t bother to explain all the reasons why they’d done it. Adults almost never approved of such methods, no matter how good the cause. So as the lecture had continued, they simply hung their heads (knowing their uncle needed to think his occasional tirades actually
frightened them). And after cleaning it all up, Edgar and Allan hid the painted panels and other horrific props in the rafters of the attic, because they suspected a time might come when reconstructing the dungeon would serve their purposes.

In this, they were not wrong.

Later that week, Aunt Judith announced that she had hired workmen to set up a home school in the basement, the earlier setting of the Halloween horrors.

The result was three days of hammering, sawing, and drilling that Edgar and Allan thought could have been reduced to a more efficient two days’ labor (saving their aunt and uncle a few bucks), if only the sweating workmen had been willing to take a little of the twins’ advice.

But the carpet layers didn’t want to hear about the chemistry of adhesives, the carpenter didn’t have the slightest interest in the optimal angle, geometrically speaking, for a miter saw, and the electrician didn’t seem to care in the least about the activity of the subatomic particles in the wiring he installed.

Instead, the workmen banned Allan and Edgar from the site (even their friend Stevie Harrison, who came
over one afternoon to help build an astrolabe out of old compact discs, was denied access to the basement).

It was a frustrating three days.

But the boys needn’t have worried.

At 8:30 a.m. on the second Tuesday of November, Edgar, Allan, and Roderick were allowed to go downstairs. The workmen were gone. In their place waited Aunt Judith, no longer in her morning velour sweatsuit but dressed like a real teacher. One would never guess it was the same person.

Or the same room! Cheerfully lit, the basement had a new carpet, two student-sized desks, one teacher’s desk, whiteboards, maps, built-in bookshelves, and an overhead projector—but no computers, because the boys’ hacking skills were not to be trifled with.

“Like it, boys?” Aunt Judith asked proudly.

“Well, it’s not exactly a lecture hall at Oxford, but it’s not bad,” Allan said.

As a final brightening touch, Aunt Judith had purchased a set of six posters that featured cuddly animals and cheery sayings. She motioned for the boys to take their seats, and then used a letter opener to slit open the package of posters. Then she took one out, unfolded it, and displayed it.

“Well, what else
could
it be but the first day of the rest of your life?” Edgar asked from a cross-legged position atop his desk.

“It’s meant to be encouraging,” she answered as she smoothed out the poster.

“What if your life is one of misery?” Allan inquired, identically cross-legged atop
his
desk. “Isn’t the first day of yet more misery actually quite depressing?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Aunt Judith said in her teacher tone of voice. “The poster refers to each day being a fresh start.”

“OK,” Edgar said, happy to put off any actual schoolwork.
“What if your life has been good up to now and this
new
day is the start of your decline into misery and madness?”

“The poster says nothing about misery or madness!”

“But it doesn’t say anything about happiness, either,” Allan responded.

“Actually, it doesn’t say anything at all,” Edgar concluded, standing and taking the poster from his aunt. Carefully, he refolded it into a square no larger than a notebook page. “You should try to get your money back for this one.”

Reluctantly, Aunt Judith took the next poster from the package.

“Let’s have a look,” Allan said.

Edgar nodded. “They’re probably all just as bad.”

Soon all but the last poster had been opened and then refolded, rejected. Pictures of panda bears, adorable raccoons, and fuzzy puppies spouting sweet, optimistic sayings were all stacked beside the teacher’s-edition textbooks on Aunt Judith’s desk. However, the final poster in the package was another matter.

“What’s this?” she asked, baffled. “They must have made a mistake at the factory.”

Like the others, the poster had a picture of a cuddly
animal—this time, a sleeping, fluffy white kitten. Nothing unusual about that. But the words underneath the picture, written in stark, gothic script, suggested neither folksy wisdom nor heartfelt encouragement. In fact, they made no sense at all:

Even Roderick Usher, sitting regally atop a bookshelf beside a paperweight shaped like a raven, looked inquiringly across the room at the nonsensical poster.

“Why would someone beware a cute little cat napping?” Aunt Judith asked. “Sleeping kittens are precious. And they nap all the time.” She looked over at the bookshelf. “Right, Roderick?”

Roderick stood and stretched, his expression noncommittal.

After a moment, she shrugged and refolded the poster. “Oh well, it must just be a mistake.”

But the boys didn’t dismiss it so quickly.

They took a particular (some might say “peculiar”) interest in things that others disregarded as mere mistakes, because they believed that oddities and seeming coincidences were actually the world’s way of communicating secret messages.

Sometimes these messages were simple to decode. Once, in downtown Baltimore, the boys had noticed a theater marquee on which two of the electrified characters had burned out. A new play about the poet Emily Dickinson,
The Poet’s Rule
, was advertised instead on the faulty marquee as:

“Darn right we rule,” the boys had observed.

Edgar and Allan discovered messages in many places. Broken billboards, half-blown-away skywriting, misprinted lists of ingredients on the backs of cereal boxes. Adults usually categorized such thinking as “overactive imagination.” But the boys knew that if you consider everything with an open and inquisitive eye, then at the very least you ensure that the world is never boring.

“OK,” Allan mused. “What might this cat poster be trying to say to us?”

“Well, what threat can a sleeping cat pose?” Edgar asked. “Why should one ‘beware’ it?”

“It’s just a misprint, boys,” Aunt Judith said.

They weren’t so sure.

“Maybe we should ask ourselves to
whom
a sleeping cat might be a threat?” Edgar suggested.

“Of course!” Allan slapped himself in the forehead as if it should have been obvious.

“A sleeping cat is a threat only to a dream mouse,” the boys said in unison.

High fives.

“Dream mouse?” Aunt Judith asked, confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

They shrugged. “Maybe we should ask the rodent
expert,” Allan suggested, with a glance at the bookshelf.

“Well, Roderick?” Edgar prodded.

Once again, Roderick Usher was noncommittal.

Aunt Judith clapped her hands in her best teacher style. “All right, enough of this lollygagging.” She set the sleeping-kitten poster aside and picked up a sheet of paper from her desktop. “This is a letter from the Baltimore School District.” She waved it in the air before flattening it on her desk to read. “It says that in seven days a representative will visit us to evaluate our ‘educational environment and processes’ in order to give final approval for our home school. It’s important, boys. So let’s get started.”

For Aunt Judith’s sake, they sighed and took their seats.

Hours later, upstairs in their room, the twins wrote a note to their former classmates: