The Most Frightening Story Ever Told (7 page)

“There are lots of other kids,” said Billy. “Father Merrin said you started this place for kids. Where are they?”

“They used to come. But not anymore. Tastes change, I guess.”

“Maybe you have to try to get them back in here. Have you tried?”

“Have I tried? Have I tried? Only all the time, Billy.”

“What about Halloween? I saw your poster in the public library. It's what persuaded me to come and check this place out. How did that go?”

“Halloween?” Mr. Rapscallion let out a sigh. “Last Halloween was the worst. That was nothing short of disastrous. Let me tell you what happened here last Halloween.”

“Halloween used to be our best time of year to sell books,” Mr. Rapscallion told Billy. “It was like the Christmas holidays for a toy shop. Or Valentine's Day for a florist's. And each year I'd make a special effort to devise a new section in the bookshop and a new surprise to go in it.

“I've always loved Egyptology. And although I've never been there, Egypt's a country to which I would dearly love to go. This year I decided I was going to do the next best thing and open a room of books dedicated to the Curse of the Pharaohs. Egyptian mummies coming back to life, living burials, flesh-eating scarabs and that kind of thing.

“So, I had a burial chamber built with golden bookshelves, a large stone idol of the Egyptian god Anubis—he's the one with the head of a jackal, the Egyptian god of death—and, on its end, an open sarcophagus with a life-size mummy standing inside. It looked pretty good, if I do say so myself. The mummy was properly ancient and sinister. As if it really was an ancient Egyptian priest who had been buried alive for, well…many years. A man who had been wrapped in filthy gray bandages that were as old as the pyramids themselves.

“Of course, the best part was when the mummy came back to life. All you had to do was touch and read aloud the inscription written on the forbidden casket, activating the sound sensor and the touch sensor. This was in hieroglyphs, of course, but there was an English translation underneath for those who don't know ancient Egyptian. It read:
DEATH. ETERNAL AND EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT FOR ANYONE WHO DARES TO OPEN THIS CASKET.

“The sensors would pass an electrical signal to the sarcophagus and, oh so silently, the mummy would start to reanimate. This would happen very slowly, too—the idea being that you might not even notice. That you might be too interested in the book you were reading to be paying attention to anything happening quietly behind you.

“First, the eyes of the mummy would open just a crack, like something that really had been sleeping for thousands of years. Then they would open just a little more and glitter with supernatural life. After a few more seconds, the bony, half-decayed hands, crossed over the mummy's chest, would shift underneath the dusty old bandages that wrapped him, and then drop slowly to his sides. Finally the horrible head would straighten on the mummy's shoulders and the thing would take a step out of the sarcophagus and then reach out and touch whatever was standing next to it. And, hopefully, give that person one heck of a fright.

“Believe me, Billy, when I tell you that it was impossible to see the poor creature and not think it stranger than Dracula, more fantastic than Frankenstein, more mysterious than the Invisible Man. Was it dead or alive? Was it human or inhuman? The first time I saw it working, I felt the awful creeping, crawling terror that stands your hair on end like sticks of raw spaghetti.”

“Oh wow,” said Billy. “It sounds awesome, Mr. Rapscallion. Really awesome. I love all that Egyptian stuff. Can we go and see the mummy right now?”

“That room is now locked.” Mr. Rapscallion sounded grave.

“Why? Did something terrible happen in there on Halloween?”

Mr. Rapscallion looked pained. “Let me tell the story,” he said. “I had put up several posters advertising our Halloween event in the Hitchcock Public Library, and in all the school libraries in and around the town. Several local authors had said they would come and sign copies of their books: Esteban Rex, the author of the Rigor Mortis books; Horace X. Horror, who wrote
Imagined Terrors,
of course; and the bestselling novelist Deacon Wordz, whose Elvis Weird books have been made into several successful and, it's fair to say, extremely scary movies. Victor Gespensterbruch, one of Hitchcock's leading ghost hunters, even agreed to give a short talk on the types of ghosts that there are.

“Everything had been prepared. There was bread and cheese. To drink there was Bull's Blood, which is a variety of Hungarian red wine, for the grown-ups. And for the kids there were Dracula Cocktails—just raspberry juice, but served in silver goblets to make it look more like something with lots of hemoglobin that a vampire would actually drink.

“On the night itself there were plenty of children. More than I've ever seen in here. They were mostly about twelve or thirteen years old. And many of them came from King Herod the Great Middle School, in Northwest Hitchcock.”

“I know that school,” said Billy. “It's a really tough school. And there are some really tough kids who go there.”

“Don't I know it,” Mr. Rapscallion said bitterly. “At first everything went well. The authors read and signed their books for customers. And Victor Gespensterbruch gave a fascinating talk. Everyone's heard of a poltergeist—a mischievous ghost. Well, he told us all about the
unterdembettgeist
—which is a recently discovered under-the-bed variety of ghost. We sold some books. Quite a few, actually. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Some of the kids—especially the boys—were a little boisterous, but you expect that. Boys will be boys. Mostly they were showing off to the girls. The way boys do, right?”

Billy nodded, although he was certain that he had never in his life showed off to anyone, let alone a girl. Why would someone do that?

“I got an idea that things might be going wrong just before eleven o'clock,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Really, most of the children should have been at home by then. But their parents didn't seem to care. Then Deacon Wordz, the author, came and told me that there was trouble with the Curse of the Pharaohs. That something dreadful had happened. So I went along there and…” He shook his head. “It was truly horrifying.”

“What was it?” Billy gasped. “Don't tell me that one of those boys had actually died of fright?”

Mr. Rapscallion could hardly speak, he was so upset.

“Would you care to see for yourself?” he asked Billy somberly.

“Why, yes, I would,” answered Billy. “At least, I think so.”

With a grave look, Mr. Rapscallion produced a key and led Billy to one of the upper floors and then along a low, dark corridor to the Curse of the Pharaohs room.

The heavy wooden door was painted gold and looked exactly like the door in an old Egyptian tomb. There were hieroglyphic symbols painted on it and the handle was shaped like an ankh, which is a sort of hieroglyph like a cross with a loop on the top: this symbol means “life.”

Billy felt nervous as Mr. Rapscallion unlocked the door and turned the strange handle. He wondered what really terrible thing he was going to see in there. A dead body, perhaps? A large bloodstain on the floor? A severed head?

“I haven't been in here since the night it happened,” explained Mr. Rapscallion. “I haven't felt strong enough to remind myself of the horror.”

The door opened with a loud creak, as if it might actually have been closed for several thousand years. Mr. Rapscallion went in first, reached for the electric light switch and turned it on.

Gathering his courage, Billy followed.

He wasn't at all sure what he was going to see. Something that Mr. Rapscallion had described as horrifying could very probably have included just about anything. But certainly Billy had not expected to see anything like what he saw now.

It
was
horrifying, in a way. And, now that he thought about it, the sight that met his eyes was, perhaps, the most awful thing he had seen in the Haunted House of Books.

The mummy was standing in the sarcophagus. It still looked like a long-dead priest wrapped in bandages. Except for the fact that someone—presumably one of the wicked boys from King Herod the Great Middle School, in Northwest Hitchcock—had spray-painted the bandages completely pink, from head to toe. Which, of course, completely ruined the effect. After all, there is nothing terrifying about a mummy that is as pink as the icing on a birthday cake.

A pink mummy was bad enough. But there was worse. Much worse. A large pair of pink furry rabbit's ears had been stuck on the mummy's head and a big juicy red carrot had been placed in its moldering, wrapped hand so that the poor old thing now resembled a weird soft cuddly toy that had been abandoned by some careless child, instead of an Egyptian priest cursed for all eternity.

“There,” said Mr. Rapscallion. The upset he felt was clearly written on his face. And in his voice. “Just look what they did to my mummy. Ruined. That's what it is. Ruined.”

“Couldn't you just change the bandages?” suggested Billy.

“Bandages?” exclaimed Mr. Rapscallion.

“I mean, that's what they did to me in the hospital, after my accident, when my old bandages got dirty. So why not just take the pink ones off and put some dirty new ones on?”

“These weren't just any old bandages from a hospital, Billy,” explained Mr. Rapscallion. “These were proper mummy wrappings from a genuine mummy of the New Kingdom of Egypt, nineteenth dynasty. They were covered with…years, many years of dust from the real Valley of the Kings.”

“Yes, but would anyone know the difference?” asked Billy. “If you did just put ordinary hospital bandages on the mummy?”

“
I
would know the difference, Billy,” Mr. Rapscallion said stiffly. “All of my sideshows in the Haunted House of Books—my little horrors, as I call them—they are all as close to the real thing as I can make them.”

“Isn't that very expensive?” asked Billy.

“Of course it's expensive,”
said Mr. Rapscallion. “But I have my standards, Billy. I have my standards. This is what gives me pleasure. It's one of the reasons why this is no ordinary bookshop.”

Billy nodded. He could not disagree with the argument that he was in no ordinary bookshop.

“Did you find out who did it?” asked Billy. “Who it was that spray-painted your mummy?”

“The culprits are known to me, yes, Billy,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Their ugly little juvenile-delinquent faces were recorded on closed-circuit television.” His face wrinkled with distaste. “The police told me their names. Not that they did anything about it, of course. The police just bent their horrible little ears about damaging property and then let them go.

“Their names are Wilson Dirtbag, Simon Snotnose, Robbie Roach and Holly Hurl; Hugh Bicep, Brad Undershort and Lenore Gas; Michael Mucus, Kate Ramsbottom, Kevin Clipshear, Wilbur Dogbreath and Lloyd Sputum. And when I die you will find those names written on my heart, Billy.”

Mr. Rapscallion ushered Billy out of the Curse of the Pharaohs room.

“Yes, the whole incident left me feeling quite depressed. I even saw a psychiatrist about it. The one who helped me with my number thing.”

“And did it help?” asked Billy.

“Yes. It did. He advised me to write a song about it. That's what I do when I need to get something out of my system now. I write a song. Would you like to hear it, Billy?”

“I'd love to hear it.”

They went down to the entrance hall, where Mr. Rapscallion sat down at the grand piano. To Billy's surprise, this was in tune.

Mr. Rapscallion composed himself and started to play.

Billy thought he played very well. And so, it seemed, did the other customers in the bookshop, because they came out of the various sections where they'd been book-browsing to listen.

Mr. Rapscallion played for several minutes. And then he began to sing.

“The Children of Today,” a song by Rexford Rapscallion

VERSE 1

Wilson Dirtbag, Simon Snotnose,

Robbie Roach and Holly Hurl.

We've every little nasty habit

A boy or girl can exhibit.

Here you see, one group of us.

Yes there is a troop of us,

Nasty little brutes who must do bad.

We know we're pretty handy

When it comes to stealing candy;

But we'd much prefer to stay in bed all day.

Our mothers and fathers are encouraging,

When what we need's a walloping,

Or a clip around the ear.

Instead give each one of us the benefit of the doubt,

We loudly shout,

But getting it, we laugh and sneer.

CHORUS 1

The children of today

Are such a wicked streak.

They scrawl things on the wall

But think reading's for a geek.

Then there's the fact they swear so much,

Routinely call you such-and-such,

Have manners that belong in a hutch

To a horrible guinea pig,

A rabbit or a rat,

Or even worse than that.

They seldom do their homework,

Or help around the house.

If you ask them they'll just smirk

Or begin to loudly grouse.

And if someone else excuses them,

And argues it's all okay,

The rest of us will say—Baloney!

It's the children of today.

VERSE 2

Michael Mucus, Kate Ramsbottom,

Kevin Clipshear and Lloyd Sputum.

Here you see, just four of us.

Yet there are still more of us,

We're the kids who'll make you sick of us.

Since we're appallingly behaved

We watch TV all day and half the night

Or play computer games and fight

Whatever monster some nerd created

But our amusement's never sated

By destruction on a small square screen.

So we'd much prefer to have been

And smashed your window for the kick.

On cell phones we'll text illiterate tripe

To some poor bullied type

Even though it's rather sick.

CHORUS 2

The children of today

Are much nastier than of old

They don't get up in the morning,

Or go to bed when told.

There's the boy who threw his weight about.

His mother thought him such a lout

She bopped him on the snout,

And the boy let out such a wail,

That his mother's now in jail.

The girl who kicked her sister

Got taken off to court.

She called the judge a blister,

Then a blackhead and a wart

Not to mention a nasty smell.

The judge ordered her to a cell

In which she should be locked.

He was shocked

By the children of today.

VERSE 3

Wilbur Dogbreath, Hugh Bicep,

Brad Undershort and Lenore Gas.

We can't see the point of this or that,

We'd much prefer to set fire to a cat,

Or maybe an automobile,

But only after we've tried to steal

The contents of the trunk.

School we don't believe important

Which is why we're mostly playing truant.

We'd rather hang around the city streets,

Like a gang of idle deadbeats

Without a future or a purpose.

You'll find our expression is morose,

Each of us you'll probably think's a punk.

So don't be fooled we're actually quite vile

Given an inch we'll take a mile

And turn your property into junk.

CHORUS 3

The children of today

Have the chance to turn out well,

We've only ourselves to blame

If they make our lives a hell.

The court appoints them a defender

Who provides a story to embroider

And helps them get away with murder,

Or at least that's how it seems.

So to parents we would remind

Sometimes it's cruel to be kind.

You have to teach kids right from wrong,

And personal responsibility.

So that to something they'll belong

And contribute to society.

But if we don't, then we're in trouble

This song's incontrovertible,

Tomorrow's citizens we must develop

Or we'll simply end up

With the children of today.