Prompt: Condemned house, pocket watch

"Ryan! Front and center!" Mom called out from the living room.

A thunder of small stomps traced it's way across the ceiling and towards the staircase. Looking up to the top of the stairwell, Mom saw a small body finally attach itself to the disembodied footsteps from upstairs. She rolled her eyes at the reliably unpredictable sight of her youngest son: clad solely in underoos, sneakers, and a tan-like layer of dirt. Ryan slowed his advance and approached her with caution.

"Ryan, have you been going through my things again?"
"But Mom, you said that we can go anywhere in the neighborhood we wanted!"
"Yes honey, only during the summertime, but I don't see how this applies to rifling through my closet?"

Ryan's eyes began to glass over with tears in the tell-tale sign that perhaps she was on to something more than she'd expected. A single prod in the right direction would give definitive proof that he'd gotten into something else that might bring any kind of uniformed man to her door, Last time was the fire department. Ryan had climbed a tree to rescue a kitten, but once it was free, he himself felt the paralyzing height of the tree branch and was too scared to climb down. He was brought back shaken, but otherwise unharmed.

"Ryan, where exactly in the neighborhood did you go?"

Ryan's chin made two small jumps just before he broke out into a bawl. Mom hit the bullseye, and what's more, she was willing to wager that there was an accomplice.

"ANDY! Get down here right now!"

Silence. No patter of footsteps from above, no answer to her request. Finally Andy emerged, taking the carefullest of steps down the stairs; hesitating on each step, as if it were to collapse from underneath him.

"Andy, would you like to explain to me why your brother is crying, even though I haven't told him he's done anything wrong?"

Andy was eerily quiet.

"Andy, would you have any idea why Ryan was going through my closet?"

Andy still remained silent.

"Ok, I want the whole story right now, because if I have to find out for myself you can rest assured that you won't be seeing your xbox until you graduate high school!"

"But MOM!"

"Don't call me Butt-Mom. Start talking, and be grateful that I don't smite you where you stand!"

Andy led Mom and Ryan into the living room for a seat and began to tell their story, Ryan's and his, first in unrelated pieces but finally gluing together.

***

Early that morning, after Dad had left for work and Mom was busy in her office, Andy waited eagerly outside for Ryan to meet him behind the secret bush by the back stairs. Nothing was secret about it as adults might notice, because the bush was in plain sight, but the boys always found it mystical enough to harbor prized toys, candy, and clandestine notes written in lemon juice. It became a sacred area at times, because they could crawl behind it and conduct secret society meetings, mission briefings, and trials.

As Ryan burst out through the back door and began to climb over the stair rail, Mikey entered the back yard through the rear gate. Mikey was a neighbor and life-long friend. Today, as with most days, he wore a blanket tied around his neck like a cape, and carried a proportionately gargantuan and beat up brief case at his side. As jovial a sight it was, Mikey was very solemn. He quietly crawled through a small gap between the house and the bush, to meet with his cohorts.

"Are you guys ready?" Mikey asked in a hushed tone.

"Ryan, did you get it?"

Ryan responded to his brother by producing a waded rag. Andy took the rag and unfolded it. Presently he removed a pocket watch and handed it to Mikey. Mikey laid his briefcase on the ground and released the clasps. He set the pocket watch down inside the briefcase and it made a hollow cardboard sound.

"Hey, is that the Ouja board?" Asked Ryan in awe.

"Nah, my sister took that with her on a slumber party last night," explained Mikey

"How is THIS s'posed to work then?" Ryan inquired, indicating at the Scrabble board crammed into the briefcase.

"I figured Scrabble was the next best thing. I can work with it."

"It's not gonna work," said Ryan, finding courage enough to try and invalidate yet another of Mikey's outrageous claims.

"Yeah it is! And last time I checked Pipsqueak, it was me who has the psychic aunt, not you."

With a glance from Andy, Ryan withheld his rebuttal; partly for fear of being benched from this adventure, but also because he had been proved horribly wrong. Mikey's aunt was a palm reader in New York. According to her, Mikey said, Mikey was going to live till he was 100 years old. Ryan and Andy weren't related to any psychics, so how could he tell that scrabble wasn't the next best thing after all?

In a few moments, they had their plan straight, and set out into the neighborhood, toward The Old Corelli House. They had to do a decent amount of evasive maneuvers so as not to be seen by the neighbors, but their vigilant play-drilling over previous summers had them moving with expert stealth. They finally found themselves standing in the first heat of the summer's day, staring at the foot of mountain that was The Old Corelli House. At the sound of an oncoming truck, the boys quickly ducked around the house and towards the rear entrance.

As they had anticipated, all doors and windows to The Old Corelli house had been boarded up. Mikey came through as usual.

"My brother said that the boards are loose on that window over there," Mikey said, indicating to a window on the side of the house.

The three boys advanced and began pulling at the boards. Finally one nail gave way and the board pivoted out of the way, leaving enough room for any of the three boys to crawl through with minimal discomfort.

The boys were overcome with the smell of dust and decaying wood once inside. They were presented with the sight of a short hallway with peeling wallpaper.

"This way," said Andy leading the others toward the front of the house and away from the kitchen at the other end of the hall.

The living room yielded a number of novel things to explore and investigate. Ryan steered clear of the stuffed crow that garnished the fireplace mantle while Mikey and Andy poked and prodded at it. Avoiding it's eyes, Ryan turned towards an end table near a rocking chair and discovered and old pipe box. Inside it he found wrapping papers, flakes of tobacco and a few matches. He pinched up the few tobacco flakes and sprinkled them by the front door, saying what sounded to him like a protective spell.

Presently the boys began preparing for the real purpose of their being there.

"Ok," said Mikey "so you're sure he used this every day?" He said, indicating to the watch in Ryan's hands.

"Yeah, I think so. I mean, he coulda forgotten it one day before I was born, but as long as I knew him he never wasn't with it."

"I guess it'll have to do," said Mikey, opening the bag of scrabble tiles and grabbing a handful. "Go get the bird Ryan, it's magic."

Ryan sat petrified for a moment but found the courage to pick up the stuffed bird, taking comfort in the total commitment they had made being there. Still, it didn't give much comfort having the thing in his hands. He had to mask the feeling that the bird might suddenly turn in place and bite his hand. He set the bird next to the scrabble board and sat on crossed legs next to his brother.

"OK, Andy, ready to talk to your Grandpa?" Mikey asked, sitting across from him.

"Yeah, ok. What do I do?" Andy said, looking down into his lap.

"Just open up the watch and think about your Grandpa. If you do it right then the scrabble pieces will spell out whatever your Grandpa has to say."

Andy rubbed the cover of the watch and then released the clasp as Mikey threw down a few tiles.

The next moment the three boys giggled unrelentingly at the sight before them. A few of the scrabble tiles tossed to the floor broke the solemn mood:

P - E - E

It was too much for them to pass up a laugh on, so they allowed themselves a few minutes of chuckling. Andy shouted through gasps of laughter that maybe Mikey should throw down more than just three tiles. Still giggling, Mikey gathered up the tiles and tossed a new handful down.

"I bet this time," said Mikey, still rocking with laughter, "it'll say P - O - O..."

But the last words fell out of his mouth before reaching the other boys' ears. His rocking became a sudden an unnerving stillness.

Ryan was the last to notice that something was wrong. He got to his feet and was nervously stepping back and forth from Mikey and the door. As the minutes waged on, Andy's attempts to rouse Mikey became more obviously a fruitless endeavor. After an eternity of what felt like silence, Ryan turned to Andy.

"What do we do?"

"I don't know," said Andy "you think it's working?"

"How am I supposed to know? Remember? We're not the one with a fortune-teller Aunt!"

Before Andy could cross the yard-long gap between the two of them to deliver a corporal response, Ryan gasped and Andy turned to see the carpet under Mikey begin to scorch.

"I wanna go home!" pleaded Ryan.

Andy agreed, adding "let's take Mikey with us, c'mon!" And the two each took Mikey by the arm and helped him to his feet and outside as fast they could. The further they got from the house, Mikey became more and more coherent. They left him at his house in a daze and raced home and upstairs to thier rooms, where, alledgedly they remained until being called down by Mom.

***

"Well I don't care what you think you saw, you go back there and get that damned pocketwatch! And you two should stop being so wierded out by Michael, he's an epileptic. Just thank your lucky charms you don't have it too" said Mom, her hand finally comming to rest on her hip.

After a few moments of looking into the wounded eyes of her sons, she told them to wait in thier respective rooms for Dad to get home, while she went to The Old Corelli House to retrive the pocket watch.

A few minutes later, Mom crawled with much greater difficulty through the window on the back side of The Old Correlli House. She was prepared to spend the rest of the afternoon rooting through the house for her father's pocketwatch, but her Motherly instincts told her to follow the burning smell. It led her down the hallway, away from the kitchen, into the living room at the front of the house. The sight was something one would expect from eight year olds, disgusting taxedermied birds off of high shelves and now within arms reach, drawers left agape, greasy fingerprints poluting a perfect dust-scape. In the middle of the room on the floor, just as Andy had described, lay the pocketwatch and scrabble board. The dim light made it hard to tell where the watch may lay on the floor.

At first she stooped, but desided to settle onto her haunches with a grunt to get a better vantage point of the mess that contained the timepiece. A brief glint led her eyes to the watch and she picked it up. As she stood she looked down once more to survey the scene. The scorching on the floor rug had made the odd pumpkin shape of a young boy's hind quarters. (It somehow reminded her of cleaning a perfect butt-print off of the couch when Ryan had sat on it after playing in the mud one day).

Mom decided to leave everything else as-is. If Mikey's Mom wanted to come back for the scrabble board then she could crawl through the window. She felt a pang of pitty for her, having an epileptic son. Still, Mikey was a sweet boy, but not the smartest.

Exiting, she looked back on the room once more. She chuckled at herself trying to imagine the boys playing scrabble in this old house. At least she could take comfort in the fact that they could spell. Before Mikey's episode, one of them was able to put down the letters B - E - H - A - V - E.