Odds Are Good (2 page)

When the nurse came to check him in the morning, she found Michael sleeping peacefully, with a dirty box beside him on the bed. She reached out to take it, but his hand wrapped around the box and held it in a grip of steel. He did not even wake up.

 

Michael would have had a hard time paying the hospital bills. But one day a man came to their house and saw some of his paintings. He asked if he could buy one. Other people heard about them, and before long Michael was selling many paintings. He quit his night job, and began to make his living as an artist.

But he was never able to paint a picture of the angel that looked the way it should.

 

One night when Michael was almost thirty he heard the voice again.

“Give me the box!” it cried, in tones so strong and stern that Michael was afraid he would obey them.

But he closed his eyes, and in his mind he saw his angel again, with his face so strong and his eyes so full of love, and he paid no attention to the voice at all.

The next morning Michael went to his easel and began to paint. It was the most beautiful picture he had ever made.

But still it did not satisfy him.

The voice came after Michael seven times that year, but he was never tempted to answer it again.

 

Michael and his wife had two children, and they loved them very much. The children were always curious about the box their father carried, and one day, when Michael was napping, the oldest child tried to open it.

Michael woke and saw what was happening. For the first time in his memory he lost his temper.

He raised his hand to strike his son.

But in the face of his child he suddenly saw the face of the angel he had met only once, so long ago, and the anger died within him.

After that day the children left the box alone.

 

Time went on. The children grew up and went to their own homes. Michael and his wife grew old. The box suffered another accident or two. It was battered now, and even the careful polishing Michael gave it every night did not hide the fact that the carvings were growing thin from the pressure of his hands against them so many hours a day.

Once, when they were very old, Michael's wife said to him, “Do you really think the angel will come back for his box?”

“Hush, my darling,” said Michael, putting his finger against her lips.

And she never knew if Michael believed the angel would come back or not.

After a time she grew sick, and died, and Michael was left alone.

Everybody in his town knew who he was, and when he could not hear they called him Crazy Michael, and whirled their fingers around their ears, and whispered that he had carried that box from the time he was eight years old.

Of course nobody really believed such a silly story.

But they all knew Michael was crazy.

Even so, in their hearts they wished they had a secret as enduring as the one that Crazy Michael carried.

One night, when Michael was almost ninety years old, the angel returned to him and asked for the box.

“Is it really you?” cried Michael. He struggled to his elbows to squint at the face above him. Then he could see that it was indeed the angel, who had not changed a bit in eighty years, while he had grown so old.

“At last,” he said softly. “Where have you been all this time, Angel?”

“I have been working,” said the angel. “And waiting.” He knelt by Michael's bed. “Have you been faithful?”

“I have,” whispered Michael.

“Give me the box, please.”

Under the pillow, beside his head, the battered box lay waiting. Michael pulled it out and extended it to the angel.

“It is not as beautiful as when you first gave it to me,” he said, lowering his head.

“That does not matter,” said the angel.

He took the box from Michael's hands. Holding it carefully, he stared at it, as if he could see what was inside. Then he smiled.

“It is almost ready.”

Michael smiled, too. “What is it?” he asked. His face seemed to glow with happiness. “Tell me what it is at last.”

“I cannot,” whispered the angel sadly.

Michael's smile crumpled. “Then tell me this,” he said after a moment. “Is it important?” His voice was desperate.

“It will change the world,” replied the angel.

Michael leaned back against his pillow. “Then surely I will know what it is when this has come to pass,” he said, smiling once again.

“No. You will not know,” answered the angel.

“But if it is so important that it will change the world, then . . .”

“
You
have changed the world, Michael. How many people know that?”

The angel shimmered and began to disappear.

Michael stretched out his hand. “Wait!” he cried.

The angel reached down. He took Michael's withered hand and held it tightly in his own.

“You have done well,” he whispered.

He kissed Michael softly on the forehead.

And then he was gone.

If my cousin Duffy had the brains of a turnip it never would have happened. But as far as I'm concerned, Duffy makes a turnip look bright. My mother disagrees. According to her, Duffy is actually very bright. She claims the reason he's so scatterbrained is that he's too busy being brilliant inside his own head to remember everyday things. Maybe. But hanging around with Duffy means you spend a lot of time saying, “Your glasses, Duffy,” or “Your coat, Duffy,” or—well, you get the idea: a lot of three-word sentences that start with “Your,” end with “Duffy,” and have words like
book, radio, wallet
, or whatever it is he's just put down and left behind, stuck in the middle.

Me, I think turnips are brighter.

But since Duffy's my cousin, and since my mother and her sister are both single parents, we tend to do a lot of things together—like camping, which is how we got into the mess I want to tell you about.

Personally, I thought camping was a big mistake. But since Mom and Aunt Elise are raising the three of us—me, Duffy, and my little sister, Marie—on their own, they're convinced they have to do man-stuff with us every once in a while. I think they read some book that said me and Duffy would come out weird if they don't. You can take him camping all you want. It ain't gonna make Duffy normal.

Anyway, the fact that our mothers were getting wound up to do something fatherly, combined with the fact that Aunt Elise's boss had a friend who had a friend who said we could use his cabin, added up to the five of us bouncing along this horrible dirt road late one Friday in October.

It was late because we had lost an hour going back to get Duffy's suitcase. I suppose it wasn't actually Duffy's fault. No one remembered to say, “Your suitcase, Duffy,” so he couldn't really have been expected to remember it.

“Oh, Elise,” cried my mother, as we got deeper into the woods. “Aren't the leaves beautiful?”

That's why it doesn't make sense for them to try to do man-stuff with us. If it had been our fathers, they would have been drinking beer and burping and maybe telling dirty stories instead of talking about the leaves. So why try to fake it?

Anyway, we get to this cabin, which is about eighteen million miles from nowhere, and to my surprise, it's not a cabin at all. It's a house. A big house.

“Oh, my,” said my mother as we pulled into the driveway.

“Isn't it great?” chirped Aunt Elise. “It's almost a hundred years old, back from the time when they used to build big hunting lodges up here. It's the only one in the area still standing. Horace said he hasn't been able to get up here in some time. That's why he was glad to let us use it. He said it would be good to have someone go in and air the place out.”

Leave it to Aunt Elise. This place didn't need airing out—it needed fumigating. I never saw so many spiderwebs in my life. From the sounds we heard coming from the walls, the mice seemed to have made it a population center. We found a total of two working lightbulbs: one in the kitchen, and one in the dining room, which was paneled with dark wood and had a big stone fireplace at one end.

“Oh, my,” said my mother again.

Duffy, who's allergic to about fifteen different things, started to sneeze.

“Isn't it charming?” asked Aunt Elise hopefully.

No one answered her.

Four hours later we had managed to get three bedrooms clean enough to sleep in without getting the heebie-jeebies—one for Mom and Aunt Elise, one for Marie, and one for me and Duffy. After a supper of beans and franks we hit the hay, which I think is what our mattresses were stuffed with. As I was drifting off, which took about thirty seconds, it occurred to me that four hours of housework wasn't all that much of a man-thing, something it might be useful to remember the next time Mom got one of these plans into her head.

Things looked better in the morning when we went outside and found a stream where we could go wading. (“Your sneakers, Duffy.”)

Later we went back and started poking around the house, which really was enormous.

That was when things started getting a little spooky. In the room next to ours I found a message scrawled on the wall,
BEWARE THE SENTINEL
, it said in big black letters.

When I showed Mom and Aunt Elise they said it was just a joke and got mad at me for frightening Marie.

Marie wasn't the only one who was frightened.

We decided to go out for another walk. (“Your lunch, Duffy.”) We went deep into the woods, following a faint trail that kept threatening to disappear but never actually faded away altogether. It was a hot day, even in the deep woods, and after a while we decided to take off our coats.

When we got back and Duffy didn't have his jacket, did they get mad at him? My mother actually had the nerve to say, “Why didn't you remind him? You know he forgets things like that.”

What do I look like, a walking memo pad?

Anyway, I had other things on my mind—like the fact that I was convinced someone had been following us while we were in the woods.

I tried to tell my mother about it, but first she said I was being ridiculous, and then she accused me of trying to sabotage the trip.

So I shut up. But I was pretty nervous, especially when Mom and Aunt Elise announced that they were going into town—which was twenty miles away—to pick up some supplies (like lightbulbs).

“You kids will be fine on your own,” said Mom cheerfully. “You can make popcorn and play Monopoly. And there's enough soda here for you to make yourselves sick on.”

And with that they were gone.

It got dark.

We played Monopoly.

They didn't come back. That didn't surprise me. Since Duffy and I were both fifteen they felt it was okay to leave us on our own, and Mom had warned us they might decide to have dinner at the little inn we had seen on the way up.

But I would have been happier if they had been there.

Especially when something started scratching on the door.

“What was that?” said Marie.

“What was what?” asked Duffy.

“That!” she said, and this time I heard it, too. My stomach rolled over, and the skin at the back of my neck started to prickle.

“Maybe it's the Sentinel!” I hissed.

“Andrew!” yelled Marie. “Mom told you not to say that.”

“She said not to try to scare you,” I said. “I'm not.
I'm
scared! I told you I heard something following us in the woods today.”

Scratch, scratch.

“But you said it stopped,” said Duffy. “So how would it know where we are now?”

“I don't know. I don't know what it is. Maybe it tracked us, like a bloodhound.”

Scratch, scratch.

“Don't bloodhounds have to have something to give them a scent?” asked Marie. “Like a piece of clothing, or—”

We both looked at Duffy.

“Your jacket, Duffy!”

Duffy turned white.

“That's silly,” he said after a moment.

“There's something at the door,” I said frantically. “Maybe it's been lurking around all day, waiting for our mothers to leave. Maybe it's been waiting for years for someone to come back here.”

Scratch, scratch.

“I don't believe it,” said Duffy. “It's just the wind moving a branch. I'll prove it.”

He got up and headed for the door. But he didn't open it. Instead he peeked through the window next to it. When he turned back, his eyes looked as big as the hard-boiled eggs we had eaten for supper.

“
There's something out there!”
he hissed. “
Something big!
”

“I told you,” I cried. “Oh, I knew there was something there.”

“Andrew, are you doing this just to scare me?” said Marie. “Because if you are—”

Scratch, scratch.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing her by the hand. “Let's get out of here.”

I started to lead her up the stairs.

“Not there!” said Duffy. “If we go up there, we'll be trapped.”

“You're right,” I said. “Let's go out the back way!”

The thought of going outside scared the daylights out of me. But at least out there we would have somewhere to run. Inside—well, who knew what might happen if the thing found us inside.

We went into the kitchen.

I heard the front door open.

“Let's get out of here!” I hissed.

We scooted out the back door. “What now?” I wondered, looking around frantically.

“The barn,” whispered Duffy. “We can hide in the barn.”

“Good idea,” I said. Holding Marie by the hand, I led the way to the barn. But the door was held shut by a huge padlock.

The wind was blowing harder, but not hard enough to hide the sound of the back door of the house opening, and then slamming shut.