Chapter 5

On the fateful day, the Wilson children - Nathan included, even though he was having grave reservations about the whole plan - rode away from home and met Luthor on the front porch of the General Store. He had two fishing poles with him, as cover. It was all he could get together, but while people would expect Nathan to have one if he was in company with Luthor, walking someplace, they might not think it odd that the girls didn’t have poles.

The store was closed, of course, it being Sunday, and no one was around. Feeling like a spy of some kind, Luthor got off the porch when he saw them coming, and wandered off between the store and the barber shop, which was next door. Anyone who noticed them would have seen that it was obvious the three were following him, but thankfully, there was no one around to notice. He handed the extra pole to Nathan, just in case. Nathan understood instantly, and grinned. Then he couldn’t figure out how to carry the pole and ride his bike at the same time, and ended up having to give it back to Luthor.

Luthor set what would, for the Wilson children, have been a punishing pace if they’d been on foot. He trotted, and even though they were on bikes, he got ahead of them about twenty yards or so and stayed there, looking over his shoulder occasionally until they were well outside of town.

“Hey!” called out Hilda Mae. She put on a burst of speed when he stopped and turned around.

“Why are you running?” she asked, breathlessly, while her sister and brother caught up. “And why are you staying up there ahead of us?”

“I didn’t think we were supposed to be together,” said Luthor, looking confused.

“Well, we are, so slow down,” groused Bernadette.

Still, while they stayed together from that point on, Luthor was too excited to slow down. To be honest, it wasn’t that he wanted to get to the mansion quickly. He was convinced that they’d turn around and leave as soon as they saw it. But the whole idea of doing something secret had him on pins and needles. He didn’t have many adventures in his life, and he was making the most of this one.

They saw the trees surrounding the place first, and Luthor led them into the tiny forest. They had to dismount then, and push their bikes. Their first view of the house was shocking, but not in the way Luthor had thought it would be. Some of the roof had fallen in. There was no glass in any of the windows. Creepers covered the ground and a whole tree was growing out of the part of the roof that was missing. One round column had fallen, and lay covered by vegetation. The corner of the house it had been on sagged downward at a tilt that made it obvious one couldn’t stand easily on the second story floor inside ... if it was even still there.

“Damn!” said Nathan.

“You sure are cussing a lot lately,” pointed out his younger sister.

“Well look at it,” said Nathan crossly.

“It’s so romantic,” sighed Bernadette. “Just imagine what it used to look like.”

They forged on ahead, getting to within twenty yards of the place before other teens started popping out of nooks and crannies all over the place.

“We weren’t sure it was you,” said Johnnie Sue, dusting off the seat of her pants.

“Who else would we be?” asked Nathan, staring up at the falling-down house. “I can see why nobody comes here.”

“We told you it was old,” said Moses, uncharacteristically speaking.

Jesse was there, but was standing off to one side, looking at the rest of the group nervously. When he heard Moses speak, though, he edged closer to the group. There was a rattling scrape from inside the house, only yards away, and everybody jumped away from the house, turning to face it.

“What was that?” asked Bernadette, her voice hushed.

“Just a branch in the wind, probably,” said Curtis Lee. “Can you believe there’s a whole tree growing inside?”

“So it wasn’t a ghost?” asked Hilda Mae, sounding disappointed.

“There isn’t any such thing,” said Moses. “Everybody knows that.”

“There might be,” said Hilda Mae stubbornly. “Nobody knows for sure.”

“You want there to be a ghost?” asked Jesse, speaking for the first time.

“Well ... no ... I suppose not,” she answered. “But it would be exciting. Ooooo I wonder if there’s any treasure. There has to be treasure!” she squealed.

Nobody moved for a few minutes, while they all looked at the rotting structure.

“Well ... are we going in there ... or not?” asked Johnnie Sue.

“I don’t think we should,” said Nathan, looking dubious.

“Come on,” wheedled Johnnie Sue. “You’re not chicken ... are you?”

“It don’t look safe,” said Nathan heatedly.

“It doesn’t look safe,” corrected Johnnie Sue, grinning.

“That’s what I said,” said Nathan, recognizing the bait, but not rising to it.

“Okay, then, we’ll just go inside the front door, like I did,” said Johnnie Sue, moving forward.

Peer pressure is strong. Not even Nathan was left behind when it became clear to him that the rest were going to go inside. One might have thought they’d stay in a tight little group, but, once inside the front door, they spread out like a S.W.A.T. team, moving away from each other to kick at this pile of dirt, or peer into that dim corner.

What they saw was like some kind of war zone. The entry room took up the middle third of the length of the house. The ceiling, or what was left of it, was two stories up. Originally, there would have been three sides to the room, with the kitchen, dining room and parlor downstairs, along with, perhaps, quarters for a butler. Above those, upstairs, would have been the bedrooms, their doors accessed by a balcony that went all the way around the three walls. Now, however, there were only two and a half walls left, the one to their right having burned and caved in at the corner. That was where the tree was growing. On the side across from that, two of the original supports for the upstairs balcony had been removed for some reason. The part of the balcony there had sagged until it was at a thirty or forty degree slope, and looked like some weird kind of slide. The railing at that part was broken too, and hanging outward, as if someone had been standing on the balcony when it sagged, and was thrown through the railing.

The flooring was mostly rotted away in the part of the house that was open to the elements, and pieces of the roof, upper room and its ceiling still lay in a jumbled heap around the trunk of the tree. Luthor went as far as he could on solid flooring and looked up at it.

“Hickory,” he announced. “Must be at least forty years old.”

“How would something like this get inside a house?” came Bernadette’s voice. All the others turned to see her hefting a rock that probably weighed ten pounds. That was a puzzle none of them had an answer for.

A breeze shifted a branch of the hickory tree, and it scraped against the wall again. Everyone turned to look at it. They relaxed when they confirmed that no ghost was responsible for the sound. Elsewhere in the house there were creaks and a sound that was almost like a sigh, which ratcheted up their tension.

“It’s just the wind,” said Curtis Lee. He had moved to where there had been a staircase that led up to the second floor. It was obvious there had been a staircase, and that it had been curved.

“How could a whole set of stairs just vanish?” he asked no one in particular, looking around.

There was no answer for that either, but it brought to mind their mission.

“How are we going to get to the attic?” complained Bernadette.

“We don’t even know there is an attic,” said Nathan.

There ensued an animated discussion about the engineering that would be required to get someone up to the second floor landing, and then how that person could help the others up. The conversation was abruptly terminated when Moses walked into view on the second floor.

“There’s another staircase,” he called down softly. “Off the kitchen, I think.”

Nobody had seen him wander off, so it took a minute to locate the kitchen. It was a wreck too, with cabinet doors missing, and dirt covering the floor. Mixed in the pile were dry, white, scattered bones.

“What was that?” asked Hilda Mae fearfully.

Luthor got down and picked up several bones, making both the Wilson girls shudder.

“I’d say coon,” said Luthor, looking around. “It either died in here, or something brought it in here to eat it.”

“Eeeewwww,” squealed Bernadette and Hilda Mae in tandem.

“Oh,” said Luthor, feeling proud suddenly, “that ain’t nuthin’. I seen bones all over the place around here. Once I saw...”

“Found it!” called out Johnnie Sue from an obvious doorway in one corner of the kitchen. She disappeared and they heard her footfalls as she climbed the stairs. “Careful,” she called back. “Some of the stairs are missing.”

It was dark in the close-walled servant’s staircase, and some of the treads were, indeed, missing. There were ominous creaks and groans as too many people, grouped too closely, climbed up stairs that were too old. All that did was make them group together even more closely. Maybe because of the groaning structure around them, no one noticed that black bodies brushed against white bodies in ways that, if done intentionally and under other circumstances, would have caused an uproar.

Still, it was instinctive to spread out once they reached the open second floor balcony that had surrounded three sides of the entryway. That balcony ended abruptly in the corner of the house that had no roof. Elsewhere, though, it led to openings that suddenly looked like gaping mouths.

It only took them fifteen minutes to arrive at the conclusion that there was nothing of real interest in the house. All they found were empty rooms, full of plaster that had fallen from walls and ceilings. They could see through the gaps in the lath that remained on those ceilings and it was plain there was no attic.

There was plainly no treasure either. The disappointment was almost palpable as they gathered once again on the landing.

“There has to be something,” moaned Bernadette, her hopes dashed.

“There’s a really neat doorknob over there,” said Moses, trying to be helpful. He pointed across to one corner of the balcony, where a single door still hung on its hinges. It was beyond the sagging section of floor, and no one had thought it was safe to try to cross it just to see if anything was in that one room.

“A doorknob?” snorted Nathan, who was thinking that he could have practiced driving this afternoon, instead of coming to this broken down wreck.

“Well, it’s crystal ... or something,” said Moses defensively. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. It is an antique and all. Maybe it’s valuable.”

“How would we get it off?” asked Johnnie Sue. “We didn’t bring any tools.”

“I’ve got this,” said Luthor, holding up his hatchet. “We could just hack it out of the door.”

“That’s vandalism!” said Hilda Mae, her voice outraged.

“Oh, come on,” said Luthor, wanting to hack something. “Nobody lives here and nobody would care anyway. You’ve seen the place. If you wait another week it will probably fall off all by itself!”

Luthor edged toward the sagging portion of the balcony. As he put his foot down there was a groan and a cracking sound. He backed up immediately.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said to Hilda Mae.

“What a chicken,” snorted Nathan. If he was going to miss driving practice, at least he was going to have something to show for it. And maybe the doorknob was worth something as an antique. “Give me that thing.” he said, reaching for the hatchet.

Luthor gave the tool to the older boy and backed up.

“Nathan...” Bernadette’s voice was heavy with warning.

“I’m gonna get me that doorknob,” said Nathan, and started off toward his goal. “Besides, maybe nobody else has ever been able to get to that room either. Maybe it’s still got stuff in it.”

That appealed to the disappointed treasure hunters, and they watched him go.

He hugged the wall, his back pressed against it, and stepped sideways onto the sloping floor. There was another groan and creak, and one of his feet slipped on the dust, sliding toward the broken railing. He edged back off the damaged part and surveyed it.