There's a Spaceship in My Tree! (11 page)

The lady led them up one story, then up two more before turning down a dark, wide hallway toward the front of the house. Light leaked through the slats in the louvered doors directly ahead. The maid swung them open. Inside, someone gasped and whirled around to face them. It was Scilla, looking like Pocahontas in an oversized robe. Seeing them, she sighed in relief and tightened the robe around her.

“You can all wait here in the sitting room,” the maid said, pulling the doors closed. “And don't touch a thing!” she added, popping her head back in momentarily.

“Does that mean we can't sit down?” Ghoulie asked, looking about the room.

“Of course you can sit,” Scilla said, rolling her eyes. “She said it was a sitting room.”

That was about the only thing the room was good for — sitting. There were books, chairs, small tables, several bookcases, and lots of glass figures, but little else — not a TV, game machine, or computer in sight. In spite of the dark woodwork, half a dozen lamps gave the room a warm glow.

“Somebody around here goes in big-time for readin',” Scilla remarked, looking over the large, carved bookcase which filled one wall. “Isn't reading supposed to be bad for your eyes?”

“Only if you read under the covers at night with a flashlight,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “Anyway, that's what my nanny told me when I tried it.”

A rush of snow pelting the window brought them around. The hailstorm had turned into a blizzard.

This was a major wall of glass — a huge bay window with ten-foot-high side panels angled in at 45 degrees and made up of a checkerboard of square, cut-glass panes. At the moment, however, it was powdered with pockets of snow and rattling in the wind.

“Wow, would you look at that!” Scilla exclaimed.

Murphy Street — trees, rooftops, and all — was white with snow. What was funny, though, was that the trees and rooftops two streets over had no snow on them.

Leaving Beamer still gazing out the window, Ghoulie and Scilla bounded into big, stuffed chairs on either side of a lamp table facing the fireplace. Scilla bounced around in hers, checking out the springs, and then leaned forward.

“Hey, look at these,” she said, noticing the glass-door bookcases built in around the fireplace. She hopped out of her chair and approached them. Fingering the cut-glass door, she looked inside at the colorful gold- and silver-lettered books. “These are the fanciest books I've ever seen!” She pulled the delicate doorknob of the cabinet as Ghoulie came up beside her.

“Rats!” she said. The door was locked. “Wait a minute,” she said, noticing a glass door on the other side of the fireplace that wasn't completely closed.

She opened the door and pulled out a book that was lying on its side. “Oooh, this one's really cool,” she said, sucking in her breath. There were squiggled gold designs all over the cover. “R.I.P.,” Scilla said, reading the biggest designs in the middle. “Who would ever name a book Rest in Peace?” she exclaimed.

She tried to open it. “Hey, it's locked!”

“Locked?” Beamer said, turning from the window. “Whoever heard of a locked book? Most of the time everybody's trying to get you to open a book, not lock you out.” He came over for a closer look.

“It must have a key, then,” Scilla said. “I bet it's right around here someplace.” They looked on the lamp tables and in a candy dish. Scilla was too short to see what was on top of the mantle, but she brushed her hands along it, feeling for the key. “Hey, what's this?” she asked when she swept something metallic to the edge of the mantle. She reached for it but fumbled it to the floor where it clanged on the tile at the base of the fireplace.

Beamer quickly scooped it up. Even more quickly, Scilla snatched the key out of his hand and grabbed the book out of Ghoulie's at the same time. “Let's try it,” she said, placing the book on the table between the two fireplace chairs.

She carefully inserted the key and turned it. With a slight click the leather flap fell loose. “It worked!” she exclaimed in a hushed voice. She opened it reverently. “Hey, it's not printed!” she gulped. “It's somebody's handwriting.” She flipped back to the front page. There, in bold letters, was written, “The Diary of Rebecca Ilene Parker.”

“D'you mean, R.I.P. is Old Lady Parker's name?” Beamer said as he reached over to flip through the pages. “She used to crawl through that tunnel?”

“We can't look at this,” Scilla gasped, starting to close it.

“Hey, look,” Beamer interrupted. “There's something about the meteor!” He pushed in closer.

“No, it's bad luck to read somebody else's diary!” Scilla insisted, trying to wrest the book away from him.

“Wait a minute!” Beamer insisted. “She's talking about the tree — our tree! See!” he exclaimed, jabbing his finger at the words: “ . . . the night the meteor struck.”

“Cool!” Scilla whispered in awe.

“What meteor?” Ghoulie asked in confusion.

“Listen!” Beamer began to read: “This was a different kind of storm. The night was clear and glowing with stars until the sky flashed with the light of a meteor shower. I saw one streak of fire slice through the night and split in half a tree down the street. Flames leaped up, then quickly faded. I don't know why. It had rained earlier, so maybe it was too wet to burn.”

He paused, turning the page to the next day's entry. He continued: “I went over to look at the tree today. It was black all over and completely split in two, but there were still little green buds all over it. It couldn't live after that, could it?”

“You were told to touch nothing!” a deep, crackling voice thundered behind them.

17
Legend

“Old” didn't begin to describe Old Lady Parker! This lady of the castle had wrinkles where no wrinkles had been before. She used a cane, but frail she wasn't. In fact, she was big enough to have been Arnold Schwarzenegger's grandmother.

“Young lady,” she said in an icy voice, “please bring that book to me.”

Scilla handed the old woman the book, still open to the page they had been reading. “We saw that you were writing about the tree and — ” Scilla said weakly.

“Silence!” the woman ordered.

“It's my fault,” Beamer stammered. “Scilla tried to close the book back up when she saw it was a diary, but I saw that about the tree and, well, I just had to know — ”

“Yes, I see,” she interrupted him, looking down at the page. She closed the book and latched it. “You must learn to balance what
you
want with respect for the property of others.” She spoke with a husky voice that was somehow deep and strong but quiet at the same time.

“Yes, Ma'am.” They all nodded together like a church choir.

“I recognize that I am partly to blame,” Ms. Parker stated as she returned the book to its shelf. “I was in such a hurry to find a lamp when the lights went out that I failed to return the book to its proper place.” She locked the glass door and turned back to them.

Looking from one to the other, she seemed to be sizing them up in a way that was downright unnerving. “So you are the children who are playing in the tree house these days.”

They all nodded their heads at once, with a stream of “uh-huhs.”

“Not just anyone can play in that tree house, you know. Those with malice in their hearts have always found the experience to be . . . nightmarish. I don't know how or why.”

She paused a moment, then continued, “So, I can assume you have no malice?”

They shook their heads from side to side simultaneously, with a chorus of “huh-uhs.”

“Go ahead, sit back down,” she gestured to them abruptly. They did so without taking their eyes off her. The thud of her cane on the wooden floor made a strange beat with her shuffling steps. “How much do you know about the meteor?”

“I . . . ,” stammered Beamer, “I saw it on display in the museum, but it didn't say it split the tree in half.”

“I've seen it too,” said Ghoulie. “It's just an ugly old rock.”

“Yes, you're right, of course,” Ms. Parker croaked. “But things can be more than they seem. Do you have any idea how many wishes were spent on that rock during the short time it flashed through the sky back in the spring of 1919?”

“Well, no,” Ghoulie mumbled with a shrug. “They're just wishes . . . superstitions. Nothing ever comes of them.”

“Yeah,” muttered Beamer. “I wished on one the day we moved in, but it didn't do any good.” He plopped back into his chair. “We're still here. My wish didn't come true — not even close.”

“I wouldn't be so sure, if I were you,” the aged woman said, pointing her cane first at Ghoulie, then at Beamer. “Wishes are not for the fainthearted. A wish, you see,” she went on as she slowly moved toward them, “is a piece of a dream. And a dream — oh, not one of those little nighttime wisps that flee when you wake up, but the kind that stick with you by day as well as night — a dream is very powerful. Maybe the most powerful force on earth.”

“Oh, brother,” Ghoulie muttered to Scilla. “It's a rock, not plutonium.”

“My hearing's very good, young man,” Ms. Parker said as she turned back toward the shamefaced boy. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

Ghoulie slid from his chair, swallowing hard, and walked hesitantly toward her.

As he approached, she held out her hand, palm down. “What do you see there?” she asked.

Ghoulie's eyes became enormous, as only Ghoulie's could. “A diamond!” he gasped. “The biggest one I ever heard of.”

Beamer and Scilla leaped from their chairs and crowded in beside him, straining to see. True enough, the ring on her finger held a glittering stone bigger than a marble shooter.

“No, it's just a rock,” she corrected him. She moved toward the window, her cane making a clopping beat on the floor with every other step. “Without dreams, you see, clay would be dirt instead of bricks and buildings; oil would be nothing more than a smelly, black bog; and electricity, only a loud, jagged streak in the sky.”

As if on cue, lightning flashed once more, illuminating the tree ship. “Billy Stoller built that tree house,” she said, peering thoughtfully at it. “He was thirteen years old, and the tree was one of the smaller ones in what was a vacant lot back then. His father wanted to use a bigger tree, not one twisted and broken. But that tree had been singled out by a falling star, and Billy Stoller would build his spaceship in no other.

“You see, Billy Stoller dreamed about traveling to the stars. Almost nobody dreamed of such things back then. But Billy took his dream and made a spaceship in a tree. I thought he was weird and laughed at him. I called him the worst possible names,” she added with a chuckle. “He might as well have had bug eyes and antennae, as far as I was concerned.

“Anyway, he'd puff up red and mad but kept right at his dream. Ten years later, when he began teaching at the college, he built that house on the lot. And not too many years after that he helped Mr. Goddard build his first rockets.

“You have to be special to have a dream like that. You see, ordinary people — people like me,” she chuckled, “don't understand that God can make some people different —special — for a reason.

“People with big dreams have lived and played on this street ever since.” She walked up smack in front of Beamer and gave him a penetrating look. “Maybe your dream isn't big enough. And maybe your wish was too small. Have you ever thought of that, young man?”

With her looming above him like a thundercloud, Beamer couldn't get his jaw to work.

“Yes,” she continued, turning back to the others, “when that meteor struck, it was like the finger of God touched the earth right here on Murphy Street. And something indescribable spread out from that spot like a ripple in a pond.”

Her eyes took on a misty look. “I don't know that you have to come to Murphy Street to get that touch. I suspect that there are other streets like this one and, for that matter, that God can touch every person if it's in their hearts to accept that touch. But, as for Murphy Street, well, three Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer winners, a number of world-class artists and musicians, not to mention a pretty fair cartoonist, grew up here.”

“And at least one big-time cobweb architect,” muttered Beamer.

“And a lot of very good people who made a big difference one time or another in otherwise normal, everyday lives . . . not bad for a street one block long,” Ms. Parker continued.

“When you see those cracks in the sidewalk down there . . .” She paused, and then continued. “Think about those children who came before you, who scraped their knees and climbed that tree just like you do now and made their dreams real.”

She looked them over critically, and then made her way haltingly toward the doorway. “We shall see what you make of yours.” Then, without looking back, she lumbered out the door in a whisper of shifting silk.

*   *   *   *   *

The storm stopped as suddenly as it began. And, amazingly, Old Lady Parker did let them go home, dry and in neatly pressed clothes.

Strangely enough, the icy snow had fallen on only one side of the park and a few blocks beyond. Murphy Street was right in the middle. The next day, Friday, newspapers were filled with stories about the freak storm. A couple of schools in the affected area, including the middle school, were closed as a result, so Beamer and the Star-Fighters got the day off to build snowmen. When they were through, though, they were surprised to see that their trio of snow figures looked like pudgy versions of Jared and his goons.

It didn't bother them quite so much anymore that they were different. After all, being special was what Murphy Street seemed to be all about. Even the idea of being “alien” was beginning to have a nice ring to it; although they'd just as soon some kids wouldn't look at them like they were French fries in need of catsup.