The first one up, next morning, was Foster Blake. He had slept industriously for eleven hours and woke up all of a piece without any lingering or yawning.
In his blue-striped pajamas he swung himself down from the top deck of the double-decker bed—he refused to sleep in the lower one—went over to the door and listened. Not a sound. It must be very early, he thought. His hair from having been slept on hard was all pressed up in a one-sided crest, and his cheek on that side was redder than the other. Opening the door, he leaned out into the hall and listened some more. All he could hear was the thump, thump of a dog scratching.
Foster liked to be the first one up. It made him feel he knew something about the day that no one else did. He got dressed quickly and quietly, all except his shoes, and ignoring the thought of his toothbrush, tiptoed along the hall and down the stairs. Katy and Othello got up to greet him, snuffling quietly and wagging. They were warm from their sleep.
"Come on, you guys, I'll let you out," Foster told them in a loud whisper. He unlocked the front door and opened it. The smell of a cold morning came in; Katy and Othello raced out and Thistle entered, looking irritated.
The dogs went tearing about the lawn. Foster watched them for a minute, but it was chilly; his breathing made smoke in the air. He closed the door and tiptoed to the kitchen; he had decided to have a little practice breakfast before his real breakfast.
The kitchen was clean and quiet; the clock ticked. Thistle, drinking from his water dish, made a little slipping sound. Foster knew where everything was: the box of corn flakes, the brown sugar, and the milk. He had made a satisfactory arrangement of these things in a bowl and was eating his way through it when something darkened the window above the kitchen table. Looking up, Foster dropped his spoon with a splatter, and the sound that came out of him was a squeak. What he saw in the window was the face of a monster: green, wrinkled, with dreadful fangs and a ghastly scowl! For an instant he stared in perfect horror.
"Hi, Foss," called the monster in a friendly voice.
Only then did Foster notice the pink and innocent protruding ears and the upstanding cowlick of his good friend David Gayson.
"Hi," he called back, chagrined at having been so taken in. He went to the kitchen door, unlocked and opened it. Davey came up the back steps wearing his own face. The rubber mask dangled under his chin like a hideous bib.
"Who did you think you were scaring?" Foster greeted him pleasantly.
"You, man," said Davey. "I saw you drop the spoon and slop the milk all over. I scared you. How've you been?"
"O.K. You didn't scare me. You just surprised me." Curiosity got the better of Foster. "But how did you get up so high? You're not tall enough to reach the window."
"There's a good old garbage pail. Two good old garbage pails. I climbed up on one, quiet as anything—"
"How'd you know I was in here?"
"I saw you let the dogs out when I was coming, and I thought I'd scare you. I knew you'd probably be in the kitchen. Could I have some corn flakes, too? No one's up at my house."
"No one's up here, either. Sure," Foster said, and went to find another bowl and spoon.
They sat eating and chattering, happy to resume their friendship. From time to time Davey would extract from his pocket some object he had brought to show Foster; first it was a compass, then a cap-pistol, then a small flashlight.
"Christmas stuff," he said. "Stocking stuff."
Next he brought out a pillbox with an elastic band around it. This he opened with tender care; inside, on a nest of cotton, lay his two front teeth.
"Those are worth fifty cents," he told Foster. "A quarter apiece, man! They're my first ones; that's why. I'll only get a dime for the others. You lost any yet?"
Foster felt humiliated by his teeth.
"Not exactly lost them," he admitted. "But they're so loose, I can kind of wave them with my tongue."
"I got new ones coming in already," Davey boasted, stretching his mouth so Foster could have the experience of viewing two tiny scallopings of white just showing at the gum.
Foster felt betrayed not only by his teeth but also by his pockets: they were entirely empty because he had put on the newly laundered jeans his mother had laid out for him. By evening, though, he knew those pockets would have tenants.
The next things Davey produced were a sort of lariat made of rubber bands, a long chain made of paper clips, a penny that had been run over by a train, a paper puncher, and last of all, carefully folded, a drawing, which he spread out on the table. It was large and brightly colored. "How's that for a moon rocket!" demanded Davey with pride. "I drew it in school."
"Wow," Foster said politely. Actually he did not think much of it and was certain he had often drawn better ones himself. But he had not seen his friend in a long time.
There began to be sounds of people stirring overhead. The two boys looked up.
"Soon it will be breakfast," Foster said. "And after breakfast, you know what? We're going to go and see the house we bought. We bought a house, Dave, you know that? It's the old one you saw with the suit of armor in it!"
"Oh, I know that," Davey said. "Your aunt told me. She told me about a hundred years ago already."
So far it had definitely been Davey's morning.
The breakfast, which Davey was quite easily persuaded to share and which both little boys ate with appetites that had hardly been dimmed by the practice breakfast, was magnificent: fresh orange juice, hot buckwheat cakes with butter and apple jelly, and bacon. Aunt Hilda's breakfasts were famous: varied and original, not just an ordinary plodding through of cereal and eggs and toast.
Everyone ate a lot. Mr. Blake groaned. "Great Scott, Hilda, a few more breakfasts like this and I'll begin to waddle!"
"Never mind, Paul," Uncle Jake told him. "We need our strength; we have men's work cut out for us. The Lord knows how long it will take to get that back door open. We never did get the front one open, if you recall."
"Hurry, everyone, to work, to work!" Aunt Hilda cried. "As soon as the chores are done, we'll all set out for the Villa Caprice!"
"We must get a new name for that house," said Mrs. Blake.
Upstairs, Portia made her bed with lightning speed and then, perched precariously on the ladder of the double-decker, made Foster's still more swiftly. "It looks like a relief map," she admitted to Julian, who had come looking for her. "All mountain ranges."
"The kid won't know the difference," Julian assured her. "You know perfectly well he'd sleep like a log if the mattress was stuffed with potatoes. Come on, Porsh; I want to show you how my plant eats hamburger."
Portia leaped down with a thud.
"How your what eats what?" she demanded, unable to believe her ears.
"My plant. It's a Venus's-flytrap. I sent away for it. It eats flies when it can get them, but there aren't any in winter, so I feed it little crumbs of hamburger."
Julian's room was a sight to behold: a museum of sorts, for Julian was a collector. He collected everything from stones to snakeskins; from fossils to butterflies; from cocoons to birds' nests. The walls were encrusted with his findings; the shelves were burdened with them. It was a fascinating place, but no one could have called it tidy.
On the window sill, between a terrarium and a tank containing a live crawfish, was the curious plant. Each of its broad leaves was tipped with a pair of flat rosy discs like a pair of queer little clam shells, fringed with crimson whiskers.
"Now watch this," Julian said. He lifted a speck of hamburger from the saucer he held and dropped it expertly into the center of a pair of gaping shells, which closed instantly, locking the fringes together.
"Oh, let me feed one, Jule, please!" Portia begged.
There was only time for one, because now Uncle Jake was calling them and they were eager to go. It took a while to get started since Foster and Davey had chosen this moment to disappear, and no one thought of looking in the cellar. Finally the repeated shouting of their own names reached the boys' attention and brought them clattering up the wooden stairs. Next Uncle Jake couldn't find the car keys, and those had to be hunted for. In the end they turned up, for a reason no one could fathom, on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. Then the telephone rang and it was a lady who wanted to talk (and talk and talk) to Aunt Hilda. But at last, at last, they were on their way, all eight of them, because of course Davey went, too.
They drove as far as Gone-Away, where they stopped for a moment to chat with Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Payton; then they went the rest of the way on foot, for the road leading to Mrs. Brace-Gideon's old driveway had long been taken over by the woods.
The day, no better than the day before, was gray and chill, and as they passed between the large stone gateposts of the drive, it was suddenly very quiet. There was no wind, and the trees, draped in great snarled capes of honeysuckle, seemed to have muffled out the noises of the world. Silence had fallen on the party, as well. It was too much for Foster. He suddenly felt called upon to give his ear-splitting rendition of an Indian war whoop. Davey attempted to outdo him; the noise startled two crows out of a tree and sent them squawking into the air. The spell of silence was shattered, and everyone began to talk again.
All of them were wearing old clothes, because, as Aunt Hilda said, "There's no sense in dressing up to cope with fifty years of dust."
Uncle Jake was carrying a toolbox. Mr. Blake was carrying a small stepladder and a crowbar. Julian had two buckets and a mop, while the women and Portia were armed with brooms, brushes, and dustcloths and had their heads tied up in bandannas.
"We look like some higgledy-piggledy left-over army," Portia said.
Walking briskly, they came to a turn in the drive, the trees thinned out, and there before them stood the Villa Caprice.
There it stood among its dead and brambled lawns, with all its windows boarded up and a big, tough, tangled vine, leafless now, tied round and round the battlements, the turrets, and the gables like a giant's wrapping twine. Beyond the house the ragged hedges looked black, and the queer tree that was called a monkey-puzzle tree looked black, too, and bristling. The whole scene was shabby and forbidding.
"Oh, dear!" wailed Mrs. Blake. "I didn't remember it as being quite so—quite so—"
"Bleak," Mr. Blake supplied. "And this is what we called a bargain! We must have been out of our minds!"
Aunt Hilda, who wanted to be comforting, said: "You know, I think when you've got rid of that ghastly porch and ripped the boards off the windows, you'll feel very different about it."
But though she tried, she didn't really sound convinced, and Uncle Jake was seen to shake his head.
"The place looks like a training school for witches," Mr. Blake remarked in utmost gloom.
The children, however, refused to be disappointed and went running toward the house with briers snatching at their jeans and Julian clattering more than usual because of the buckets.
"I think it's suave," he assured Portia, as he jolted along beside her. "All it needs is fixing up. Heck, it hasn't been fixed up in fifty years! What do they expect?"
"I don't know," Portia said, feeling grateful to her cousin and indignant with her other relatives. "I think it's a perfectly wonderful house!"
"So do I," agreed Foster, dog-trotting behind them, slightly out of breath. "It's so nice and fancy; that's what I like about it. It's got so much stuff. I think it's suave."
Portia turned to beam at him. "And you know what you are? You're a wonderful boy," she told him.
"Big deal," Foster said, embarrassed.
They slowed down, for they were near the house. It towered above them, very large and quiet, very old. The great porch that ran halfway around it was supported by pillars set with cobblestones that reminded one of monstrous chunks of peanut brittle. The unpruned vine hung down in portieres from the eaves of the porch, and on its rotting floor were drifts of leaves. It was a dark, unfriendly thing, and even Portia thought she would not miss it when they took it away.
"But what will happen to the owls that used to nest here?" she asked.
"Oh, they'll find another site," Julian said. "If there's one thing you don't have to worry about, it's owls."
The slow grownups caught up with them at last, armed with their peaceable weapons.
"We'll try the back door first," Mr. Blake announced. "The front one might as well be turned to stone. We may have to blast!"
"Why can't we just climb in the window, the way we did last year?" Foster wanted to know. He would have preferred this course.
"It's boarded up again, too, remember? And anyway we can't just go flitting in and out of odd openings all the time like—like swallows," his father said. "We need a door. Like people."
He led the way, and they all trooped around one corner, then another, to the back stoop, with its boarded-up back door.
"Nailed fast, of course, and the nails are rusted," Uncle Jake said. "Well, let's have a go at it."
It took a while. Foster and Davey grew bored and began to roughhouse, tumbling on the dead grass. The women poked about the shrubbery trying to identify the bushes and decide which ones were still alive. Portia sat on one of the buckets, turned upside down, watching and whistling between her teeth; trying to, anyway; her tooth braces made it nearly impossible.
Her father and uncle and cousin worked and worked at the barricade, and finally, as they pried them loose with a crowbar, the nailed boards were wrenched free, with loud, protesting snarls.
The door they had hidden all these years was painted dark green; just an old ordinary door with a brown china doorknob, but Portia jumped up to have a look at it, and everyone else came running.
Uncle Jake waggled the knob uselessly and gave the door a kick or two.
"Locked, of course," he said. "But not bolted inside, I trust. Even Mrs. Brace-Gideon couldn't depart from a house leaving every door bolted inside."
"Maybe she departed from a window the way we did," Foster suggested, but no one listened to him.
Uncle Jake brought a jumble of keys from his pocket.
"From Gone-Away: old keys from other old locks," he explained. "Uncle Pin's idea. He thought that one might fit."
One did, too. Almost the very first one. It turned nicely in the keyhole, and they could hear the lock give way, but the green door, set in its ways after half a century asleep, absolutely refused to budge.
Mr. Blake sighed heavily.
"You know, you don't just buy this house," he said. "No. You have to go to war with it, you have to conquer it! All right, Jake, let's go."
The two big men put their shoulders to the door and gave a tremendous shove, as Mr. Blake turned the knob. The first try didn't work, nor did the second, but on the third the door burst open, and they almost fell in. The others crowded close on their heels, Foster and Davey burrowing under arms and elbows like a pair of beagles.
A cloud of dust fumed up from the floor. As it cleared, they found themselves coughing and sneezing in a dim passageway.
"I suppose this—" Mrs. Blake was starting to say when all at once Uncle Jake, who was ahead, gave a mighty yell and a leap backward.
"Great Scott!" shouted Mr. Blake at the same instant, and Foster, whimpering, turned to scramble for his mother.
"There's somebody there! A ghost, a ghost!"
Most of them, shocked, had caught a glimpse of it: a figure standing in the passage, standing very still, as though it had been waiting for them.