Thomas creeper and the p.., p.8
Thomas Creeper and the Purple Corpse, page 8
The doorknob started to turn . . .
Thomas ducked into the shadows of the Viewing Room as the pounding began on the other side of the door, followed by some horrible words, words no human being—young or old—should ever hear.
Open this door or I’m going to get some Novocain and thread and sew your eyelids shut in your sleep!
A few chirpy buttons sounded in the foyer. Hooking his head away from the doorframe, Thomas looked over at Jed. His uncle was cradling his small, outdated flip phone against his scarred ear.
“Green? Yeah. It’s me. J-Boy.”
Thomas scrunched up his face. J-Boy? What?
“Cancel it. Yeah. You heard me. I’ll close the deal myself.”
Jed flipped the phone shut. In a voice devoid of its usual sarcasm and malice, he turned to Thomas and whispered:
“Alright. I’ll cover for you, Tommy Boy. Go do what you gotta do.”
Thomas leapt for the stairs. But when he got halfway up the staircase, he turned back.
“Jed, what were you telling Mr. Green to cancel?”
The familiar leering grin returned to the unmasked side of Jed’s face. The pounding on the other side of the door grew louder, though it didn’t seem to faze Jedidiah Creeper one bit.
“A hit on Gerald Fipps,” said Jed nonchalantly. “Green knows a lot of good family men in Atlantic City.”
Thomas choked on his own breath, or maybe it was the dust motes he’d kicked up flying up the staircase.
“You were going to have Gerald Fipps . . . assassinated?” Thomas whispered back. “By like . . . the mafia?”
Jed shrugged his shoulders, as if what he’d heard wasn’t worth getting all worked up about, like the time his prize-winning greyhound Bixby ripped out the throat of one of his fellow competitors . . . a second before he crossed the finish line.
“Family’s family, Tommy Boy,” said Jed, still flashing his half-masked grin. “Those mafia guys know that better than anybody.”
Jed made a shooing motion with a greasy hand.
Slowly, Thomas turned back around. He crept up the final steps in petrified silence. He couldn’t believe it! His uncle had set in motion a dangerous scheme, a scheme far more dangerous and criminal than the one Thomas had concocted himself. What would’ve happened if he hadn’t snatched the folder from Korvin’s office? Thomas shuddered to know.
When he reached the dark rectangle of the second floor landing he looked out over the foyer. He watched Jed twist the lock and throw open the door. Spreading his arms wide, in a voice sparkling with sarcasm, he shouted up into the rafters:
“Buonasera! Welcome to the Olive Garden! Are you here for the bottomless breadsticks?”
. . .
Thomas shut the door to his bedroom and closed his eyes while a three-part circus broke out downstairs.
He could hear his father shouting, followed by his mother’s warbled pleading. Lower your voice, Elijah! Listen to Jed! He said Thomas is home safe! Perhaps for the first time in his life, Jed fought to be the only voice of reason in the room. Now, shut your traps for a second! Tommy Boy got stopped by Korvin! Tommy found a body down by Town Beach walking back from ninny-prancing class. Fine, Adele! Ballroom dancing! Whatever! Korvin kept him in the clink for questioning. Now before you lose your [expletive] minds, listen . . .
But this part—this very crucial part—Thomas couldn’t hear. What lie was Jed spinning? He cracked the door open a few inches and strained his neck to listen.
Footsteps moved away from the foyer. He heard his father snarl. I need to get off my feet. Come into the Study. Then he heard his mother chime in. I’ll go get something heated up. Soon all Thomas could hear was his father and Jed’s muffled voices behind the door of the Funeral Director’s Study and the distant clink of plates coming from the kitchen.
Thomas closed his bedroom door. As he turned back around, his eyes locked on a swirling green glow on his bed. Finn, the faithful ghost-dog, was up from his daily slumbers in dimensions unknown to living men—or living dogs—for that matter.
The wolfhound’s great tongue, also bathed in bright green ectoplasm, lolled out one side of his mouth as he looked expectantly up at Thomas, ready for a new adventure.
“Not now, Finn,” said Thomas, rushing over to his desk and clicking on his desk lamp. The ghost-dog sank back despondently into the folds of the bed. He kept one eye peeled on Thomas in the off-chance something interesting or potentially dangerous called for his protection.
Thomas fished into the pocket of his soaked tuxedo and pulled out the P.B.O.U.D.. He laid the magic pill box on the desk and craned the springy lamp so that the beam of light focused directly down on the pill box’s cold, egg-shaped lid.
Thomas squinted his eyes, examining the mysterious box. Yellow and blue flowers circled the lid in a delicate pattern. To anyone who didn’t know better, it looked like a regular old antique pill box your grandmother might have.
Where a little gold clasp would have been on the side, like the one Thomas had seen his mother use for her migraine pills, this pill box had no clasp at all. The two halves were ringed with gold. When Thomas first opened the antique box at Korvin’s office, clockwise as Cyril had directed, he’d felt a little resistance, as if the two halves were magnetized in some way, which was strange, though if he was being honest, there was nothing really normal about anything that happened in the past twenty-four hours.
“Okay,” Thomas whispered as he scrutinized every detail in the pill box. “But how do I get anything out?”
He lowered his head until his nose was almost touching the lid. When he’d opened the P.B.O.U.D. in Korvin’s office nothing had flown out. That couldn’t be the way objects came out, only in. He put the pill box on its side, searching for writing, for some secret clue he would have missed if he was only looking at the top. Nothing.
He put the P.B.O.U.D. on its back and blinked his eyes a few times. As he removed his hand, a hazy image started to take shape inside the porcelain, like something rising up from the bottom of a glass of milk.
The image crystallized into a face.
A face of a woman, smiling back at him.
Thomas felt the fine hairs on his neck prick up. The woman moved! She turned from a side profile to staring directly up at Thomas with dark, enchanting eyes. She had a powdered face with heavily rouged cheeks and a sizeable beauty mark over her top lip like a little shaded-out moon. She wore a periwinkle blue gown with a sumptuous bodice and frilly white sleeves that started below the elbow. As for her hair, she had an explosion of tan curls all meticulously folded in so many intricate layers it must have taken the hairdresser a whole day to pull it off.
Suddenly, the woman raised a small fan over her head and flashed Thomas a coy smile.
Above the tip of the fan words began to materialize.
Thomas mouthed the words in breathless wonder, feeling as if his legs might give out at any second.
Madame Purfoy says:
Tap lid twice to open
Then stand back AT ONCE
The woman gazed up at Thomas. Flashing a little smirk, she raised a thin, penciled eyebrow. When Thomas didn’t move, she scrunched up her face and pointed back at the letters with her fan. Thomas turned the pill box over. He was about to tap the lid when he remembered what Cyril had told him. Make sure you have enough room when you open it later in case you have something huge to unload. He wasn’t unloading anything that big. But what if something else was stuck inside?
With a trembling hand, he carried the P.B.O.U.D. over to the center of his bedroom and placed it down on the creaky floorboards. Sensing something out of the ordinary about to happen, Finn cocked his ears from his spot on the bed. Licking his lips, the ghost-dog let out a little expectant bark.
“Yeah, don’t get too excited,” said Thomas. “I might blow up the house.”
Thomas leaned down and made two sharp taps on the pill box’s lid. He jumped back. The P.B.O.U.D. started to vibrate. The weird turquoise light prickled around the golden ring, throwing sparks everywhere.
The lid flashed open.
Expanding inside a beam of turquoise light came the bundle of folders from Korvin’s office. The folders floated in the air while Thomas fell back against his bed, feeling the death-chill of Finn wafting against his shoulders. As the folders hovered in the electrified air, Thomas could see fragments circling them—dark and rusted bits of metal. Then the light sucked back into the pill box. The lid snapped shut. The folders and rusted fragments clattered to the floor.
Thomas ran over. Finn gusted off the bed in his own ghostly way, following dutifully behind. Thomas knelt down.
In the swirling green glow coming off Finn he surveyed the contents of the P.B.O.U.D.. Beneath another folder marked “First and Second Victims” he could read the name Gerald Fipps written in mechanical penmanship.
Thomas snatched the folder, flapped it open, and pored through the document. His eyes glowed triumphantly in the unnatural light. It was all there! Korvin must have kept the report in his desk as “collateral.” He remembered the word from a book he read about Cold War spies keeping incriminating photos of other spies in the event a big secret got divulged or they defected to the enemy’s side. Thomas glanced past the mechanically handwritten pages describing Gerald Fipps’s drunk-driving incident, focusing on a strange metal object lying on the floor, one of the rusted fragments that had tumbled out of the P.B.O.U.D..
Thomas picked up the metal piece and held it under the freezing glow coming off Finn’s snout. Finn examined the object with a knowing look. He had no clue what Thomas was investigating, but possessing that wordless understanding that is the hallmark of all great dogs—even undead ones—he knew whatever his master and companion held in his hand must be of some great importance. And indeed it was.
The rusted fragment Thomas held in his hand was shaped like a sliver of moon. But the sliver was broken at the two crests, forming two swoops like a capital cursive E. Thomas traced his cold finger around the swoops. What was it? And what was it doing inside the P.B.O.U.D.? He didn’t have time to speculate. He had to get the evidence down to Jed so Jed could convince Thomas’s father not to disown his only surviving son and “sew his eyelids shut” in his sleep.
He flapped Gerald Fipps’s folder shut and scrambled to his feet. He ran over to the window and placed the rusted fragment on the ledge so that it wouldn’t get sucked up by a vacuum or kicked under his bed. Flinging open his bedroom door, he flew out onto the landing. He whipped down the rickety steps, reaching the door of the Funeral Director’s Study right as Jed was backing out.
“Trust me, brother o’ mine,” Jed called back through the crack of the door, “you’ll want to see this. I have it right out here.”
Jed swiveled around, knocking into Thomas.
“About time. Is that it?”
“Yep. It’s all there. I think we got ‘em, Jed.”
Jed’s eyes sparkled with wicked delight. For a split second it looked like he might reach over and pinch Thomas’s cheek, something Thomas was certainly not prepared for.
“I thought I heard you, Thomas.”
Mrs. Creeper emerged from the kitchen, oven mitts gloving her hands as usual. Jed took his cue to leave. Flashing Thomas another wicked half-masked grin, he squeezed back through the Funeral Director’s Study and shut the door behind him.
“Don’t you worry, Thomas,” said Mrs. Creeper, having noticed the dark splotches where Thomas’s lime-green Bravado had been soaked through. “Sally at the Hygienic Hem is an absolute wizard with chemicals. She’ll have everything back in working order in time for next weekend. Don’t you worry at all.”
Thomas sighed, though his mood had brightened considerably, even if there was a chance that the Bravado wasn’t ruined after all. He could hear Jed jumping up and down and roaring behind the door.
It’s a gold mine, Elijah. A trifecta that’s gonna hit BIG.
“Come on,” said Mrs. Creeper, turning Thomas around by the elbow. “Let’s find you some dry clothes and get you something to eat. You can tell me all about your terrible time down at Town Beach. I’m so sorry, Thomas. Why are these things always happening to you?”
Thomas shrugged. “No clue. Unlucky, I guess.”
Mrs. Creeper sighed and cast Thomas a loving but worried glance. Shaking her head, she turned back towards the kitchen, Thomas trailing slowly behind her.
“What happened in here?” Thomas asked as soon as his sopping feet hit the tiled floor.
The room was overloaded with dozens of stacked glasses and plates. There was barely any space left at the table.
“Your uncle actually fixed something for once,” said Mrs. Creeper, peeling back the tinfoil on a large casserole plate. A smell of overcooked meat and cheese, not entirely unpleasant, filled the room. “The disposal backed up into the dishwasher,” Mrs. Creeper continued. “Not sure how that happened.”
Thomas was about to say something smart about the messy state of the kitchen, when he realized he’d sound exactly like Jed. His mother didn’t need any more flak after all the hours she spent taking care of them and working to keep the funeral home afloat.
“There are fresh clothes in the dryer, sweetie. I’ll make a plate for you while you clean up.”
Thomas slipped over to the utility room off the side of the kitchen. The room was dark, thankfully, so Thomas had some privacy. He quickly changed in the darkness and soon was back at the table with a slab of pasta, cheese, and sausage, bubbling on a plate in front of him.
While he dug in, his mother peppered him with questions about the body down at Town Beach. Thomas did his best to make sense between steaming bites. With every horrible description his mother seemed to retreat farther and farther back towards the sink, gripping her frail neck as if being choked, her green eyes wide with terror.
When Thomas got to the part about the corpse’s body being painted an unnatural purple, Mrs. Creeper let out a gasp and backed straight into a large pewter beer stein teetering precariously on the edge of the sink. The beer stein tumbled to the floor. Luckily, it had been emptied hours ago. The smeared drinking vessel belonged to Jed, and helped him “think clearly” whenever he was working on repairs. Not surprisingly, most repairs never saw completion after Jed’s “barley goblet,” as he referred to his beloved beer stein, got refilled several times over.
Mrs. Creeper gathered up the beer stein from the floor. Thomas could hear her grumbling under her breath—something about Jed leaving the “wreckage of his life like toys all around the house for someone else to clean up.”
Suddenly, the phone hanging on the side of the cupboard rattled in its antique cradle. Mrs. Creeper got up and answered the phone.
“Hello? Oh, what a wonderful surprise.”
Thomas listened as his mother’s voice changed altogether, sweetening to a tender cadence that told him whoever was on the phone had to be someone special.
“He’s right here. I’m looking at him right now. I’m sure he can’t wait to catch up with you. Hold on, I’ll get him.”
Thomas looked up from his half-finished plate. He mouthed the words “Who is it?”
An image of feathery bangs and elf-like ears flashed inside his brain.
“I guess today isn’t a total washout,” said Mrs. Creeper, thrusting the phone into Thomas’s face. “Would you believe it? It’s your friend Jeni. All the way from London.”
Chapter Six
Total Darkness, Burning Shells
On any other miserable day, under any other miserable circumstance, a call from Jeni would be like a rare sun sighting to Thomas. Any gloomy thoughts circling his world would be instantly cast off; he’d start to breathe free and easy again. But tonight, under very different circumstances, he felt like locking himself in the utility closet and never coming out again.
As Mrs. Creeper handed over the phone and scooted out of the room, she flashed Thomas a very obvious, very embarrassing “let me give you some privacy” look that only made the flush in Thomas’s cheeks go even more scarlet. He felt waves of guilt flood over him as he held the handset up to his lips—guilt for snapping at Jeni at Sal’s; guilt for being a jerk and not answering Jeni’s request to join her at the airport; and a new kind of guilt, which didn’t fully make sense to Thomas yet, but was still guilt all the same:
Guilt for having feelings for another girl, a girl he’d only known for a few hours.
“Hello? Thomas? Are you there?”
Thomas opened his mouth to speak . . . but the words wouldn’t come out. A wall of guilt held them back. Finally, after hearing a lot of shifting around on the other end of the phone, Thomas forced himself to speak.
“Oh, hey, Jen. I was . . .”
Think, you idiot, think! Say something normal!
“. . . getting out of the shower.”
The shower? He slapped his forehead so loudly Jeni probably heard it across the Atlantic.
“Oh, sorry. Should I—”
“No, no, no, no,” Thomas stammered. “It’s fine. How . . . how are you . . . Jenalyn?”
Jenalyn? Really? What are you doing, man?
There was another awkward pause, which Thomas assumed was Jeni processing why he’d used Jeni’s full name, the one only her parents called her when she was in trouble.
“Not great to be honest,” Jeni continued after an excruciating silence. “I mean . . . the program’s out of this world. The other girls are really cool, Thomas. Well, most of them. There’s a few snotty ones who act like they’re part of the Royal Family. We toured Buckingham Palace today, and I think they got grand delusions . . . I mean delusions of grandeur. You know what I mean.”
Buckingham Palace? Thomas felt a pang of jealousy. Jeni was getting to see the rest of the world. Just like she’d said in her letter.
“We came over on the train last night to play this British school called Armsley—or Aignsley? I don’t know. One of the two. We lost yesterday. But we’re back at it bright and early in the morning . . . which is like in four hours, I think.”
