The Wizard of Odd

THE WIZARD OF ODD
On my summer vacation, my mother decided she wanted to get away. Away from work, dishes, traffic, noise, and a whole long list of things. I was among the list of things she wanted to get away from. My father couldn’t get off work or he would have gone too. Mother decided to go to Hawaii for two weeks. She also decided I should go visit my cousin. Dad had the house to himself, and considered that to be good enough. He planned to do nothing besides going to work every morning. He wouldn’t do any yardwork, or housework, or anything productive. He wouldn’t even cook. Pizza would be ordered, and television would be watched. Mom would lounge around and enjoy sand, sun, and relaxation. I was shipped off to Maine to stay with my mother’s brother and his daughter in their huge house on a hill.
On the airplane, I found myself dreading the time when I had to go stay with Becky. But I kept telling myself that it wouldn’t be as bad as it was the last time we were together. That had been two years earlier. I told myself that we had both matured over that time. When I had gone to spend spring break with her when I was thirteen, almost every minute was agonizing torture. All the pranks and jokes and schemes she planned and carried out seemed to be for the purpose of scaring, annoying, embarrassing, or sickening me. I figured that by now Becky would be over such childish things. Pondering, and thinking, and silently feeling sorry for myself, I decided that even if Becky was still determined to be a butt, I would rise above the situation, and would handle everything gracefully and not get mad or try to retaliate.
I turned my attention to the Pauly Shore movie playing on the screens, and ate my stale peanuts. All too soon I was standing in the airport waving at my Uncle Max and cousin Becky. They had been waiting for the airplane to arrive and had come to pick me up. Becky grinned and hurried over followed by her father, who gave me a simple,
“Hey, Kid,” as he picked up my suitcase and Becky pried my carry-on away so she could help too. Memories flooded over me as I heard Becky’s voice again. I suddenly recalled all the stories she had told about the old house she lived in. Horror stories about all the deaths that occurred unnaturally in the basement, and how previous owners were frightened to death by figures of long deceased relatives pursuing them down hallways, and body parts being found in closets and drawers. Young and trusting, I had no reason to doubt her. Consequently, I was scared out of my pajamas when a fully dressed coat rack jumped out at me from the depths of my closet. I hopped backward and tripped on my bunny slippers, fell, and landed in an undignified heap as Becky stumbled out of the closet doubled over with laughter. But that had been two years ago, and I was sure that things had changed. They must have.

Three hours later, I was inwardly kicking myself for imagining anything so foolish. As soon as we had arrived at the sprawling mansion, Uncle Max handed me my suitcase and climbed back into his automobile.
“Gotta go. Be back later.” was what he said just before he drove off.
Seven entire words so far. We were off to a great start.
“Come on!” Becky hollered, and I turned around in time to see her disappear through the big double doors in the front of her house. Craning my neck, I looked up to the roof, four stories above me. The front of the building was drab and ugly. Brown and gray and a sick green were the only colors there. My uncle couldn’t have imagined being able to afford this place if it hadn’t been in such poor condition. I guess my uncle likes his solitude because the house came with 570 acres of land. Much of that area is very steep or perfectly vertical, and so overrun that few would have wanted it anyway. The longest driveway I had ever seen wound it’s way back and forth and around the hill and was the only way to get to the house that sat on the large, mostly level top.
“Hey!” Becky stuck her head out the doors and prompted me to come inside. I followed obediently and had to wait a while once inside for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Cobwebs hung everywhere and dust covered all surfaces. I followed Becky up the stairs and deposited my bag and suitcase in a bedroom on the third floor. I didn’t complain about the remoteness of the location, thinking instead of how good the exercise would be for me, going up and down the stairs. Becky immediately started a game of hide and seek. Becky seemed to derive great pleasure in scaring me out of my wits. She promptly disappeared, and a few moments later I heard her voice holler from somewhere down a hall, “All right, try to find me,” I sighed to myself, set off toward the sound of her voice, and promptly got lost.

For what seemed like an eternity, Becky taunted and teased me, leading me all over the gigantic house. I’d hear sounds and glimpses of something and move after it, only to find an empty room or hallway. Much of the third and all of the fourth floor had no electricity hooked up, and I was often left in the dark, feeling my way out of an area, when something cold and slimy touched my cheek and I flinched away and ran into a table or chair and received several bruises before I found my way to some light. As I moved through the house, I turned on as many lights I could find, and opened all the curtains and blinds I passed in an effort to illuminate as much space as I could. Clouds of dust arose and I promptly went into sneezing fits. Occasionally I’d hear laughter, so I turned toward it and follow, determined to catch Becky. I was very close to quitting and calling off this “game” of Becky’s and find my way to my room, and lay on the bed listening to my Walkman for a few hours, when Becky’s voice seemed to come from right behind me.
“You almost found me. You’re so close.” I rushed in that direction and found myself at an intersection, stairs going up and down, and another hallway. Becky’s voice floated up to me from down below, and so I went that direction. Four more halls, and three flights of stairs later, I came to an open door with another set of stairs going downward. Becky’s voice giggled and said, “Well you found me! I was in the basement the whole time.” For a moment I just stood there debating whether or not I should go after Becky some more, or just leave, and let her win. I really didn’t want to go down to the basement, but even more, I didn’t want Becky to think she’d got the better of me. So I went down. The stairwell became a black tunnel, and there was a meager glowing area down below. The heat went up a few degrees, and was almost too comfortable. I reached the bottom, my eyes adjusted to the almost nonexistent illumination, and there she was.

When I saw her, standing in the eerie yellow green light, I gasped in horror as I spotted the creature she was holding in her arms. I could tell that the thing was some kind of primate, it looked a little like the type of monkey that appears in that Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this was no ordinary monkey, it had parrot wings!
“B-Becky,” I stuttered, backing up a couple of steps, “tell me it’s a toy, tell me it’s made of rubber, plastic, it’s stuffed, that it’s just another one of your stupid practical jokes, please tell me it isn’t real... is it?"
“Of course she’s real, Blockhead.” Becky giggled, “What do you think my Dad’s been doing down here all these years, finding a cure for cancer?”
“I-I wasn’t sure, it’s just that developing a mutated species of monkey-bird isn’t quite what I had in mind.”
“Ever since my dad saw The Wizard of Oz, he’s wanted to become a scientist and develop a real breed of flying monkeys.”
“So now instead of just bird stuff on everyone’s windshield, there’ll be monkey stuff also?”
“I don’t think you will have to worry about that problem for at least twenty years, because Eve here is only the second of her kind in the world.” Becky said, shifting the monkey-bird from her arms to her shoulder. Eve, which I gathered was the thing’s name, wrapped her tail around Becky’s neck, chirped and chattered, and began running her fingers through Becky’s hair.
“So you’re telling me that there are two of these things, that there is another one somewhere in the house?” I was slowly getting used to seeing the monkey-bird sitting on my cousin and was beginning to think the little thing was cute, and I was curious about what the other one looked like.
“You can see Adam, but I’m not allowed to let him out of his cage, since he can, and will kill and eat anything that is stupid enough to get within his reach, other than Eve, surprisingly. You have no idea how different Adam and Eve are. They are exactly opposite. If you think that Eve is cute and small, Adam is huge and dreadfully revolting. If you think Eve is harmless and couldn’t hurt a fly, Adam is a lethal slaughterer that would go after a herd of rhinos just to see how many he could exterminate until he’d had his fill of the game.”
“Wow, Becky, why do you call them Adam and Eve if they’re so different?” I asked.
“Dad knows that there is absolutely no way that these two creatures could be the mother and father of a breed of flying monkey that would be safe to call pets. He named them that because they were the first of his many creations that he could reasonably call animals, and not monsters. Please do not ask me to describe the failed experiments, I don’t want to think about them right now.”
“Okay,” I agreed, I didn’t really want to try to imagine anything disgusting in that dark basement anyway.
“Why don’t I show you some of the tricks that Eve can do, and then take you to see Adam?”
“That would be great, but first could you turn on some normal lights? I can’t see a thing in here!”
“Sure.” Becky laughed and moved over to a wall. The sudden movement knocked Eve off her shoulder, and for a moment I was sure the monkey-bird was going to hit the ground, but at the last mill-second, Eve spread out her wings and gained altitude. She hovered about four feet above the ground and just stared at me. I stared right back.
Suddenly I heard a few clicks and was temporarily blinded by the light. When I could see again, I was amazed by the cleanliness of the basement lab. The cobwebs and dust ended at the bottom of the stairs, it was like being in a hospital room. There were tables in the center of the room, and lining the walls, there were empty metal wire cages stacked up on top of one another. About seven solid metal doors, spaced evenly along the walls caught my attention and curiosity, but I figured I would ask about them later. On the tables were beakers and bottles filled with boiling neon colored liquids. In between the bottles and beakers, there were microscopes and a few gallon jars with unrecognizable masses of flesh in them.
I shuddered and turned away from the tables towards where Becky and Eve were. A miniature jungle gym hung suspended from the ceiling by thick fishing line, it had almost everything you could imagine! It had bars, tires, ropes, and seemed to be a flying monkey’s paradise.

We had been watching Eve do tricks like flying from one place to another and retrieving small objects, when the lights flickered on and off abruptly. Becky had been in the middle of explaining to me that her dad told her to make me be afraid of the basement so that I wouldn’t wander down there and accidentally see something that would cause me to be in therapy for the rest of my life, and that her father was actually a much nicer person than he pretended to be when I was there. Apparently this deception had been to keep me out of the basement also.
“My dad has allowed me to tame and train Eve because it makes her easy to handle.”
“I don’t mean to sound rude,” I decided to cut in with a question, “but why are you so much nicer down here than you are upstairs?”
“I’m sorry for being such a brat up there, but that place is so spooky, I do pranks and things that lighten up the mood for me. If you are really mad, I apologize, I just had to do something to save my sanity. I had to stay upstairs with you because you weren’t allowed down here until now, which is because dad finally thinks you are mature enough not to go and blab about them to everybod-”
It was during this word that the lights flickered. Becky gasped and grabbed my arm. Eve screeched and flew to Becky, landing awkwardly on her head and grabbing her chin with both hands, thus looking somewhat like a furry Easter bonnet, because of the colorful wings protruding from her back.
“It appears,” I chuckled nervously, “having the lights flicker does not happen often.”
“That means a power surge!” Becky said, as if that explained everything.
Becky started fumbling around in her pocket for something and exclaimed, “Aha!” just as the lights went out completely.
I had been staring into complete blackness for several moments before there was a pinpoint spot of light moving around on one wall. It stopped at a drawer and a hand reached out of the darkness and opened the drawer and took out a battery operated lantern. There was a click and Becky was surrounded by the white glow of the lantern, her eyes almost as wide as Eve’s. “Oh no, I forgot why Dad never had the lights on all the way!,”
“I’m not sure I want to know, but I have a funny feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“This is no laughing matter!” Becky frowned at me, beginning to pace. Eve looked as if she were completely comfortable just staying right where she was perched on Becky’s head.
“Okay, since this is such an old house, the people who first built it didn’t design it to have wires for electricity running through it, or pipes for plumbing, for that matter. When my Dad bought it no one had lived in it for many decades so it had to be converted to his needs. To install the electricity and plumbing involved knocking holes in walls and stuff like that, which can be expensive. Dad wanted to use as much of his money on lab equipment as he could, so he decided to do the wiring and stuff himself, to save money. He is a scientist, not a construction worker. He did a good job, but you can’t use the upstairs electricity and still have everything on down here. When I am upstairs, dad shuts off the lights down here and anything else he doesn’t think is essential. The electrically charged bars around Adam’s cage take up a lot of juice, so whenever there’s too many things on, it trips the circuit breakers.
“I totally forgot about the upstairs lights still being on! The last time this happened, Dad was home and was able to, well he was able to help fix the problem.”
“Well why don't we just go to the fuse box and flip a few switches?” I wondered what the big deal was, and why she was so frightened.
“Don’t you see? It’s too late! He can get out! He might be out already!”
“He?”
“Adam, he’s gonna kill me!”
“I thought you said he was in a cage.”
“The cage was electrified, that was the only thing keeping him in there!”
“If I were him and I got out, I would try to get as far from here as I could, not stick around and go after some pip-squeak humans.”
“You don’t understand, Adam isn’t an ordinary animal, he’s going to hold a grudge! He sees me outside his cage when ever I go with dad to look at him, and is going to kill me just because I didn’t let him out!”
“What if he doesn’t know that the power is off, won’t he just stay in the cage?” I asked.
“The cage has three separate layers of bars, the inner layer has an electricity charge that gives Adam a major shock whenever he touches it. The second layer would kill anyone or anything that would touch it, and the last and outer layer has an extremely mild charge to it just to make sure no one touches the middle layer. The outer layer also has bars that are very close together so even if they wanted to, no one could touch the second set of bars. Adam is continually testing the bars to see if he could find any weak spots and would know in about fifteen minutes, if he hasn’t already.”
I was at a loss for words. Obviously, If I was to believe Becky, we were now in a very perceptible and existing peril. A thousand thoughts a second were flowing through my head. Some of them were: I hope dad remembers to feed my fish. Where is that fuse box? Why did I have to turn on all those lights? Man, my shins are going to look black and blue tomorrow. What was that slimy thing that touched me in the dark? Will I ever see my parents again? Will Adam get out? What will we do if he does? Where did Uncle Max go? What would he do if he were here? What if birds were tickled by feathers? How did Uncle Max create these things? I really wish he were here, he could help us by taking care of the problem, or at the very least, impart some of his greater wisdom, so we could take care of the problem. If a man tries to fail and succeeds, which has he done? Gee, that little monkey is cute.
I turned to ask Becky if it would work if we went to the fuse box and turned on the electricity before Adam discovered it was off, when the nearest metal door was ripped off it’s hinges and this black blur came at me. A powerful fist bashed me across my face, twisting my head around, and my neck snapped. Everything vanished in a red haze, and I died before I really knew what was happening. You may wonder how I could write this story if I’m dead, and I’d have to admit that I don’t really know.