The Kneebone Boy (12 page)

“Here we are,” Haddie said, and led them into a small round room that was a kitchen of some sort. It had a little pink play oven that reached no higher than Lucia’s hip, as well as a tiny pink play refrigerator. There was a real sink, though much squatter than a normal one. In the middle of the room was a small pink plastic table with four tiny pink chairs, the backs of which were shaped like hearts. Haddie nodded toward it.

“Sit. Hungry?”

They were. Haddie opened the tiny play refrigerator and looked inside. There couldn’t have been much in there, but still she stared inside thoughtfully for quite a while. Finally, she pulled out two jars of something or other and a loaf of bread. Using a pink plastic knife, Haddie slathered the bread with the contents of the jars, then handed each of the children a sandwich on pink plastic tea saucers.

The last time they had eaten had been at the Indian restaurant, so they all bit into the sandwiches eagerly. After a few chews, however, they all pulled faces of disgust and swallowed with difficulty. Haddie was watching them, fascinated.

“Don’t like it, do you?” she asked happily.

“What is it?” Max asked.

“Peanut butter and jelly.”

“Jelly?” Lucia wrinkled her nose. “You mean that wiggly stuff?”

“She means jam,” Max said; then explaining to Haddie, “Our jelly is Jell-O.” He opened up the sandwich now and studiously examined the gloppy mess inside. “Americans love this stuff, don’t they?”

“And British people don’t, huh?” Haddie raised one eyebrow and nodded significantly. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Max agreed. He loved to think. In fact, he went so far as to take another bite of the repulsive sandwich so as to think more about it.

“Do you have anything else to eat?” Lucia asked, looking around the kitchen doubtfully.

“I’ve got canned soup. Loads of canned soup. In case there’s a siege. Do British people like soup?” Haddie said.

They told her that they did. She opened the oven door and pulled out two cans of soup and a can opener. Then she opened a box that was sitting on top of the little refrigerator. The top of the box said Young Mad Scientist and had a picture of a boy with dishevelled hair wearing a lab coat and holding a test tube. From inside the box, Haddie pulled out a Bunsen burner, two test tubes, and a box of matches. After flipping a lever on the bottom of the Bunsen burner, she struck a match. The burner began to hiss and when Haddie touched the match to the air above the barrel, a blue flame shot out. She opened up the can of soup and carefully poured it into the test tube. Then, with a pair of tongs clamped around the tube, she held it over the flame and the soup began to cook.

“This is a castle folly, isn’t it?” Max said.

“That’s what they told me when I rented it,” Haddie said.

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes, what on earth is a castle folly?” Lucia asked in a very irritated tone.

“It’s a sort of play castle,” Max answered.

“It’s exactly a play castle,” Haddie said.

The Bunsen burner cooked the soup rather rapidly, which was a good thing considering that Haddie had to cook six test tubes full of soup in order to feed them all. As she did, she told them about the castle folly.

“The castle across the way, Kneebone Castle, is very, very old, built in the 1300s for Lord and Lady Kneebone. Apparently the Kneebones liked to have loads of kids but didn’t enjoy being around them. They built this folly for the kids to live in, with their own servants and tutors and enough to do so that they wouldn’t bug their parents. Nice, huh? Anyway, generations of Kneebone kids have grown up here. The last bunch were real pigs. I spent the first few days here digging filthy socks out of the garden hose and scraping gum off the floor. But it’s a castle, hey? I always wanted to live in a castle, ever since I was a kid. I can’t afford a real one, but I could afford to rent a fake one for the summer. And I was told that there are hidden tunnels and a secret passageway.”

“So this place doesn’t have any history, then?” Lucia asked. “No bloody battles or poisoned goblets or anything?”

“Nah. Not here in the folly,” Haddie said as she tipped a test tube of soup into Otto’s pink plastic bowl. “Now if it’s tales of blood and gore that you’re after, the Kneebone Castle across the way is—” She stopped as though she remembered something.

“What?” Lucia asked eagerly.

“What?” Haddie responded blankly.

“You were going to say something.”

“No, I wasn’t.” She stared back at Lucia challengingly. “But
you
were just about to tell me why, at half-past midnight, you’ve all suddenly arrived at my home.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Lucia said.

“Well, don’t you think it’s time you did?” Haddie said.

So they told her the whole story, and she listened beautifully. While she listened, she pulled her feet up on her chair and picked at a scab on her ankle. She picked at it until it bled, but she was so interested in the story she didn’t even notice. She looked admiringly at the Hardscrabbles during the parts about Frog Nose and taking the ride from Saint George, though Lucia may have exaggerated the element of danger just a bit.

When Lucia was finished, Haddie sat in silence for a moment. They thought she was most probably contemplating their bravery and quick-thinking. Finally she said, “I have one question.”

Lucia nodded eagerly. She loved talking about the day, because all in all it sounded like a tremendous adventure.

But Haddie’s gaze slid over to Otto. “What I want to know is why you don’t remove your scarf?”

The question took them all by surprise. It had been many years since someone had asked Otto that question.

“He won’t answer you. He doesn’t talk,” Lucia said.

Haddie ignored her and kept looking straight at Otto. “Come on,” she said to him. “What’s up with the scarf thing, Slick?”

There was a long silence while Haddie waited for Otto to answer. He looked away, stroked the cat in his lap, fiddled with his scarf, then went back to eating his soup. But beneath his overgrown hair, his eyes were scooting around nervously. Still, Haddie waited. It was unbearable for Lucia, who was used to answering for Otto promptly.

“He just really likes his scarf, that’s all,” Lucia said finally.

Haddie leaned across the table so that her face was inches from Otto. In a quiet voice she said, “We know better, don’t we, pal?”

Otto looked up from his soup, startled. He opened his mouth as though he were about to say something. Lucia’s and Max’s eyes grew wide. Then he shut his mouth again.

“It’s late,” Haddie announced. “Finish up the soup, then time for bed. And seeing as you are invaders in my castle, I think I’ll put you in the dungeon. You don’t mind dungeons, do you?”

It was hard to say since they’d never been in one. But Lucia, at least, thought it sounded gruesome, so she said, “Not at all. We like them actually.”

Haddie gave them T-shirts and shorts to wear for pyjamas and a tube of toothpaste, but they had to use their fingers for that since their toothbrushes were back at the willow tree. In a real castle the restroom was just a hole in the floor, called a garderobe, and all the nasty stuff fell through a hole and out onto the ground or in the moat. Thankfully, this castle had a real restroom, though it was so tiny you had to keep your arms close to your side or you’d hit the walls.

Afterwards, Haddie led them back out through the hallway, down one of the dark, winding stairwells, and into a room with bare stone walls and one slitty little window high up the wall with a iron grill over it. Hanging from
the ceiling by chains were three pallets with thin mattresses on them. While the Hardscrabbles had been changing and brushing their teeth, Haddie had put out some blankets and pillows on the beds.

“Try to keep still-ish during the night,” Haddie said.

“Why?” Max asked.

“Because if you keep still,
they
will too.” Haddie walked to the door and then turned back. “You’ll stay for a while, won’t you? You won’t skedaddle back home tomorrow?”

“Our dad won’t be back for several days,” Max said. “We have nowhere else to go.” (Not quite true.)

“Excellent,” Haddie said.

Then she shut the dungeon door. And bolted it. The Hardscrabbles weren’t too happy about that part. Still, as Lucia said, what was the point of sleeping in a dungeon if the door was left unlocked?

“What do you think
they
are? The things that will keep still if we do?” Max asked.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?” Lucia asked. She didn’t ask this in a taunting way. She asked this in a hopeful way, because it’s always more satisfying to be brave when someone else is afraid. Especially if it’s someone who is occasionally braver than you are.

“Not exactly. I’m just slightly . . . restive,” Max said.

“That’s crap. You’re as nervous as a pigeon,” Lucia said.

“That’s what I said,” said Max.

“No, you didn’t. You just said you were tired,” Lucia replied.

There was silence in the room. Dungeons are exactly as dark as you think they would be, by the way.

“Restive doesn’t mean
tired
,” Max said finally. “It means nervous.”

It does actually. I looked it up later. However, I wouldn’t advise using that word because it will only annoy people, and they will think you are a giant-size prat.

Otto sat down on one of the pallets, making the chain squeal a bit. Right after there was a sound of something skittering across the floor and up the wall. Startled, Lucia and Max leapt up on a pallet too—the same one—and the skittering continued for a few seconds more. Chester was the only one who thought it was a good idea to see what was crawling about. He had bounded off Otto’s lap and was running around on the floor, chasing something that they could not see in the blackness. He didn’t catch it, because he jumped back in Otto’s lap and there was nothing hanging out of his mouth. The fifth leg probably slowed him down.

“I guess that was the
they
she was talking about,” Max said when all went quiet again.

“Otto?” Lucia asked. Through the darkness, she could see his scared, pale face staring back at her. “It’s okay. It’s probably just mice.”

“Crawling up the wall?” Max said.

Lucia punched him in the thigh.

“Let’s just go to sleep,” Lucia said. She jumped off the pallet and climbed into the empty one. Suddenly they heard the skittering again, fast and furious. This time it seemed to
come from the opposite side of the room, crawling down the wall and across the floor, then back up the wall. Chester leapt off Otto’s lap and chased the thing again, making a flying leap for it as it climbed the wall, then landing on his side with a thump. After that, he stood vigil by the wall, waiting for it to skitter back down again.

“Did you hear what she said about underground tunnels and secret passageways?” Lucia said, for Otto’s sake mostly, to keep his mind off the thing in the room. “Tomorrow we should explore.”

Otto nodded, but Max only replied, “Hnnn?”

“We should explore, I said,” Lucia repeated.

“Right,” Max said, but he sounded preoccupied. He was thinking deeply and importantly. Lucia knew from experience not to interrupt him when he was thinking deeply and importantly. If you let him alone, he would eventually tell you something very interesting.

Finally, he said, “I was just thinking about Haddie.”

“What about her?” Lucia asked.

“Did you notice something odd about her?” Max said.

“Well, she’s awfully young for a great-aunt, but it works out if you do the math,” Lucia said (though she still hadn’t been able to).

“No, no, not that,” Max said.

“She seems lonely,” Lucia said. “She really wanted us to stay.”

“Maybe,” Max said. “But that isn’t it.”

Max could be infuriatingly slow to come to the point sometimes. Lucia was forced to lean across and smack
him on the head with her pillow. “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, could you just tell us already?”

“Ow! You didn’t need to do that, you know,” he said.

The skittering started up again, and this time Lucia saw the thing. Her eyes must have adjusted to the dark. It was a rat. Quite large and running down the wall. A noise came out of her mouth that Max says was a shriek but really it was just a gasp of surprise, with some extra sound to it.

They all sat up in bed then and watched the rat race along the bottom of the floor, with Chester right behind it, then up the wall. It went straight up, like a spider, all the way until it disappeared into the ceiling. Chester sat by the wall and stared up, his tail curled into a question mark.

“Rats can’t climb walls,” Lucia whispered.

“I know,” Max whispered back.

Suddenly he jumped up on his bed noisily and leapt off of it, then rushed to the center of the room. The sound of skittering started up and sure enough, the rat was climbing back down the wall. This time Chester crouched low and pounced just as the rat hit the ground. But the rat flew out from between his claws, apparently unhurt, and shot across the floor again. With a leap, Max threw his whole body down on the creature, much to Lucia’s disgust and awe. He stayed on the ground for a few moments, holding the rat beneath him with great difficulty. The creature was crying out with a strange whining sound, until it shot out from beneath him and hurried back across the floor and up the wall.