Once Upon a Midnight Eerie: Book #2 (Misadventures of Edgar/Allan) (2 page)

But Edgar and Allan knew that wouldn’t do for an answer.

Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith didn’t understand how it worked with their nephews, though they’d raised them since Edgar and Allan were orphaned at age five. The boys’ parents, rocket scientists Mal and Irma Poe, had been accidentally launched into space while making final adjustments to the payload section of an Atlas V rocket. The tragedy made national news. In the ensuing seven years, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith had loved and cared for the boys, though they never grasped just how connected their nephews were.

So, in answer to their aunt and uncle’s questioning looks on the sidewalk outside the Pepper Tree Inn, the twins simply shrugged their shoulders and said, as one, “Maybe we could have done with a little more sleep.”

Just then, the international award-winning movie director Werner Wender and his assistant, Cassie Kilmer, emerged from the lobby. Cassie had been hired just a few days before. She was model-pretty. Nonetheless, Mr. Wender was, as always, the center of attention. Wearing classy shades, a white linen suit, a weathered fedora, and brand-new-out-of-the-box sneakers, he jumped down the last three stairs, landing on the sidewalk as lightly as a man half his age.

“Amazing!” he said to the Poe family. Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith looked confused.

“How’d you do it?” Mr. Wender asked the twins.

“Do what?” they inquired, putting on their most innocent expressions.

“Your TV appearances!” Cassie answered, gesturing enthusiastically. Her many bangles and charm bracelets made an unmusical clatter.

“Truly original!” Mr. Wender said, clapping the boys on their shoulders. He was unpredictable—one minute blissful, the next blue. The twins were glad that this morning he was feeling blissful.

“Someone’s already posted the two interviews on the Internet, lined up side by side,” Cassie explained.

“I just got the link,” Mr. Wender continued. “It’s creating a lot of interest in the two of you. And in our movie! And that’s never a bad thing for the box office.”

Uncle Jack’s and Aunt Judith’s eyes widened at Mr. Wender’s mention of the Internet, which they considered to be darker and more dangerous than the Spanish Inquisition.

“It was as if you were each in two places at once!” Mr. Wender continued. “How’d you pull it off? Hidden microphones and earpieces?”

“Pull what off?” Aunt Judith inquired, turning to the twins.

Uncle Jack scratched his balding head.

A limousine, shinier and longer than either of the limos that had carried the boys to and from the TV studios, glided up to the curb. A uniformed driver jumped out and ran to open the back door.

“We have to go to the production office,” Mr. Wender announced. “Why don’t you explain your stunt to your aunt and uncle? It’ll give them a good laugh. And keep up the good work, you two.”

“See you this evening, boys,” Cassie called.

She and Mr. Wender climbed into the limo, and the chauffeur closed the door.

And
whoosh!

Gone.

It was a lot for Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith to take in.

Two weeks before, their nephews were fighting crime. Now it was TV, movie, and Internet stardom. . . .

“All this and it’s not even eight o’clock in the morning yet,” Aunt Judith observed.

Uncle Jack shrugged, as if giving up trying to understand what his nephews had gotten into this time. “Listen boys, they’ve got pastries here in New Orleans called beignets. They’re like doughnuts, only better.” He lowered his voice, turning away from Aunt Judith who didn’t like him to eat sweets. “Who’s up for breakfast?”

WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW .  .  .

A LETTER DATED ONE WEEK BEFORE:

NOTE:
The text of the preceding letter is written in a replacement code intended to disguise the communication as mere gibberish to prison guards or any other reader except its intended recipient. The decoded translation is as follows:

Dear Cassandra,

As your grandmother, I’m proud that you’ve become one of the most accomplished con artists in the entire southern United States. Your violent streak is a credit to the family. And now you’ve been presented with an opportunity to put your talents to great personal use!

Surely you’ve read in the newspaper about your father’s recent failure in Kansas and his subsequent escape from authorities. You and I have something to gain from these events, my dear. Namely, revenge.

Wasn’t it he who long ago put me behind bars for a crime
he
committed? His own mother, who taught him everything he knew! And wasn’t it he who abandoned you as a girl, ignoring your offers these past years to aid him in his criminal enterprises? What kind of a father is that? But now you have a chance to destroy the project to which he’s dedicated himself for more than a decade, his Edgar and Allan Poe quantum physics experiment. It is simple. All you need do is kill
both
of the twins before he finds a way back to this country. That’ll teach him to underestimate you, my dear!

Can it be coincidence that the Poe twins are coming to New Orleans, your home? No, it is fate! I trust you can find a way to get hired onto that movie crew. You must act now. Time is short.

Grandmother

“THE STUFFED CAT”

WITH
the boys’ first scene not scheduled to start shooting until seven p.m., the Poe family bought tickets for a late morning tour of New Orleans on a red double-decker bus that would have looked more at home in London.

“That’s strange,” Allan said. “Look at the license plate.”

“Seems more appropriate for a fire truck or police car than a tour bus,” Edgar observed.

Allan nodded. “Unless it’s not meant for everybody.”

“Yeah, another warning for us.”

It wasn’t the first.

Since crossing into Louisiana, the boys had noticed license plates on passing cars that read:

They had kept an eye out for unusual occurrences. Still, nothing bad had happened.

At least not yet.

“Everybody on board,” called the driver.

The twins left Aunt Judith and Uncle Jack on the lower level and took seats on top in the open air. On an empty seat between them, they unzipped their backpack. Out popped the curious head of their beloved black cat, Roderick Usher.

“Hey, you can’t have a cat up here,” said the driver when he came to check on the upstairs guests before embarking on the tour. “This is a bus, not a circus train!”

Edgar and Allan not only disliked what the driver had to say, but also the way he said it.

He stared the boys down, his hands on his hips. “No pets allowed.”

“That’s cold as ice,” Edgar said. “
Downright frozen.
”

The driver waved his hand in front of his face as if to disperse a bad smell. “I just want that pet off my bus. Now.”

The twins weren’t going to leave Roderick alone all day in the hotel room.

“This isn’t a pet,” Allan said.

“I don’t care what you call it,” the driver snapped. “It’s a cat.”

“No, it’s not,” Edgar insisted.

“You think I’m blind?”

The boys shook their heads. “It used to be a cat, but it’s not anymore.”

Their parents had brought Roderick home as a kitten just one week before the rocket launch that took their lives. Naturally, Allan and Edgar would have loved him even if he’d been ordinary. But Roderick was not ordinary. With a figure eight of white fur against the pure black of his chest, he was very stylish. And he happened to be among the smartest cats in the world.

“He used to be a live cat,” Allan explained to the driver. “But now he’s more like a stuffed toy.”

“Yeah, don’t you recognize expert taxidermy when you see it?” asked Edgar.

The driver narrowed his eyes.

Edgar and Allan had taught Roderick many tricks. Just two weeks before, in Kansas, Roderick had saved their lives by unknotting a rope on command (the cue being the twins whistling “Ring Around the Rosy”). Additionally, Roderick could imitate the sound of a monkey whenever his masters said the words “tree swinger,” the barking of a dog whenever they said “poochie,” and the crying of a baby whenever they said “spilled milk.” But his greatest feat was what the boys called “The Stuffed Cat”—Roderick would tighten his muscles and freeze, glassing over his eyeballs, for up to three minutes or until the boys released him with a snap of their fingers. His cue was the phrase “downright frozen.”

So this was what Roderick was doing now.

“You mean taxidermy as in
dead
?” the driver asked, looking at Roderick’s motionless head and eyes. “Like the stuffed animals in the natural history museum? Or a hunting lodge?”

Allan nodded. “‘Taxidermy,’ an early nineteenth-century word, derived from the Greek—”

“
Taxis
meaning ‘arrangement,’ and
derma
meaning ‘skin,’” Edgar finished.

By now, a trio of female tourists, all wearing matching shirts and too much perfume, had gathered around the twins.

Edgar removed the stiff, motionless cat from the backpack and held it toward the driver. “Want to hold him?”

The man stepped back.

“My, he looks so real,” said one of the ladies.

“We’re
very
good taxidermists,” Edgar said.

The driver took a deep breath. “Well, I guess a stuffed cat can stay.”

“Thanks, sir.”

Grunting, the man turned and clambered down the spiral staircase. A few moments later, the bus lurched to a start, veering into the traffic outside the tourist office.

The Poe twins turned to the trio atop the bus and winked. “Watch this, ladies,” they said, snapping their fingers.

Roderick suddenly came back to life, meowing and purring.

The women jumped, startled.

Then they started laughing. “Nice trick, boys!”

“Hey, it’s Roderick you should be complimenting,” Allan said.

Settled in their seats, with Roderick curled between them, the twins soaked up the November sun as the bus pulled away from Jackson Square. It was warmer here than in Baltimore, where their friends would be bundled now in winter coats and mittens.

Allan and Edgar wore T-shirts.

Nothing beat a winter day spent in the warm sun, except maybe a school day spent out of school.

This was both.

It had been almost six weeks since Edgar and Allan were expelled from Aldrin Middle School, victims of Professor Perry’s lies. Since then, they had not only traveled to Kansas, rescued their cat, and escaped the professor’s plan for their destruction, but, in doing so, had also earned a handwritten letter from the Baltimore superintendent of schools inviting them to return to class. Of course, in the meantime, Mr. Wender had asked them to be movie actors.

So school had to wait.

They didn’t miss the homework or the tests, which for Edgar and Allan were always too easy to be of much interest.

But they missed their friends.

So when the red double-decker bus drove past the magnificent old mansions on St. Charles Avenue, they thought of Katie Justus. She wanted to be an architect and spent most of her free time drawing pictures of houses with stately columns and century-old ivy, just like these.

And when the bus stopped on Magazine Street so that everyone could disembark for a lunch of po’ boy sandwiches (a famous New Orleans specialty consisting of roast beef or fried oysters or shrimp on a toasted French roll), the boys wished their best friend Stevie “The Hulk” Harrison was there too. He’d probably eat three or four, if given the chance. And they regarded the sandwiches as the best-named food ever, in any language: po’ boys!