Deadman's Castle Read online

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  THE POLICEMAN

  BUGGING OUT

  WHAT THE MONKEY SAID

  DEAD END

  BECOMING THE WATSONS

  DAD’S RULES

  FUN AND GAMES

  FOLLOWED HOME

  “SOMEONE’S GETTING OUT!”

  AROUND THE LION

  THE BOOKS

  A HANDFUL OF SNOW

  THE OUTSIDERS

  A FRIEND OF FANNY’S

  MR. MORON’S HAT

  THE SITTER

  WALKING TO SCHOOL

  WHO ARE YOU?

  THE HORRIBLE PLANE CRASH

  THE BIG BANG OF FRIENDSHIP

  MY CRAZY DAD

  FOUR-RING CIRCUS

  ASKING THE FOLKS

  THE SLEEPOVER

  THE RULES OF FRIENDSHIP

  A WHISTLING LOON

  WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE DEAD

  “WELCOME TO HELL”

  THE OLD HOUSE

  FLOWER BOXES

  THE BOOGEYMAN

  THE SKINNY MAN

  AN INNOCENT CHICKEN

  WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TELL A SECRET

  A BLACK CAR

  LAUNDRY DAY

  THE REST OF THE STORY

  THE YEARBOOK

  THE PARTY

  IN THE MOONLIGHT

  A SECRET DOOR

  BREATHING IN THE DARK

  AN OLD SONG

  PANTS ON FIRE

  THE BRAVE LITTLE DOG

  THE MEN IN DARK SUITS

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Margaret Ferguson Books

  Copyright © 2021 by Iain Lawrence

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  Printed and bound in January 2021 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lawrence, Iain, 1955– author.

  Title: Deadman’s Castle / Iain Lawrence.

  Description: New York : Margaret Ferguson Books, Holiday House, [2021]

  Audience: Ages 9–12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: “12-year-old

  Igor and his family have been on the run from the sinister figure he

  calls The Lizard Man for as long as he can remember and he wishes that

  they could just live a normal life”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020013114 | ISBN 9780823446551 (hardcover)

  Subjects: CYAC: Witness protection programs—Fiction. | Family

  life—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Middle schools—Fiction.

  Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.L43545 De 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013114

  ISBN: 978-0-8234-4655-1 (hardcover)

  For Harold Stetler

  THE POLICEMAN

  The policeman looked like a grizzly bear. He had little black eyes and a nose like a snout, and shoulders as wide as the doorway. He had to squeeze sideways into the kitchen, carrying a long gun that he placed carefully on the table. Then he sat down beside it, took off his hat, and didn’t move until morning.

  He came again the next day, and every day through all of November, always arriving just before dark. Nobody told me why he was there. But as a boy only five years old—a kid in kindergarten—I was thrilled to have a policeman in the house. I stared at his badge and his gun, hoping he would invite me to touch them. But he spoke to me only once, in a bearlike growl as I went up to bed. “Sleep tight, kid,” he told me. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  We moved away at the end of the month. I didn’t know why. We went in such a hurry that I couldn’t say goodbye to my friends, so suddenly that we left nearly everything behind, including—I imagined—the policeman. Months later, I still pictured him sitting all alone through the night in our kitchen.

  We drove for many days, over mountains and prairies, to a little green house that smelled of cats. On our first night there, my father sat me down and said, “We need to have a talk.”

  I thought I was in trouble. On a creaky old sofa that was fuzzy with cat hair, I cuddled up beside Mom.

  “We think it’s time you learned a few things,” said Dad. He stood in front of us, looking down. “A few months ago now, I saw someone do a terrible thing. So I went to the police and—”

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  “Shh,” said Mom. She put her arm around me.

  Dad started again. “I went to the police and told them what I saw. And now there’s a very bad man coming after us.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants to get even.”

  Mom pulled me closer, like she was trying to protect me. The springs in the sofa made squealing sounds.

  Dad kept talking. “He’ll try to find out where we live, and if he does…”

  Dad never finished that sentence. He saw that I was nearly in tears and started over, maybe hoping not to scare me. “From now on,” he said, “I want you to keep your eyes peeled. Watch for a man with a lizard tattooed on his skin.”

  “What do I do if I see him?” I asked.

  “Run away,” said Dad. “Scream for help. Do whatever it takes, but never let him catch you.”

  We changed our names and started over as a new family. Then, just as I was getting used to that, we moved again—and then again, and again. Wherever we went, that bad man was close behind us, and year after year we ran like rabbits in a field, dashing here and there, always in a panic. He chased us from Oregon to Florida, from Iowa to Idaho.

  I imagined him in a thousand ways: now with the lizard clinging to his shoulder, a green tail coiled round his neck. Now with a painted Godzilla standing in flames on his chest. Sometimes his whole body was one giant tattoo, with green scales all over him. And sometimes he was more a monster than a man, a slithering thing with claws instead of fingers.

  I called him the Lizard Man, and for six years I lived in fear of him. Every night I dreaded going to sleep, because he even chased me in my dreams.

  BUGGING OUT

  On my twelfth birthday, when I leaned forward to blow out the candles on my cake, I actually wished for the Lizard Man to find us. I wanted it all to end, one way or the other. The flames bent and stretched like they didn’t want to go out. But they did, and my little sister laughed and my parents clapped, and I saw all of us sitting there in our stupid paper hats and thought I might cry.

  I hadn’t had a real party, or even a friend, since kindergarten. I had moved so many times that I couldn’t remember how many houses I’d lived in. And to top it all off, as I lay in bed that night trying not to sleep, I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten my real name.

  It was a very cold night in the first days of winter. Through a tiny gap in the curtains I watched the bare branches of our chestnut tree moving in the wind. Like skinny witch’s fingers, they clawed at the side of the house. They tapped on the glass. With blankets pulled up to my chin, I kept staring out through that gap as I worked backward through my list of names.

  Alan Hess. Jordan Taylor. Darryl Edwards.

  Some seemed like old friends I’d left behind. Others were more like strangers because I’d known them for only a few months, or a few weeks, or even a few days sometimes.

  Gordon Labella. Bobby Bates.

  I wanted very badly to get right to the end, or actually right to the beginning, back to the time when I’d never heard of the Lizard Man. But I fell asleep at some point, and the next thing I knew
someone was leaning over me, pushing me down on the bed.

  I tried to scream. A hand clamped over my mouth. I tried to kick. I tried to punch. But the person pressed even harder.

  Then I heard his voice—and it was my father’s voice—telling me in a hoarse whisper to lie still, to be quiet. “Shh,” he said.

  I let my arms go limp, my legs go limp, and I lay like a dead man. Then Dad took his hand from my mouth and told me, “We’re leaving.”

  His voice was trembling. He stood up and closed the curtains all the way across. “Get your kit and come downstairs,” he said. “I’m going to get the car ready.”

  He walked away through the faint pool of yellow that the night-light splashed across my carpet, out to the dark hallway and down the stairs. My little sister appeared in the doorway, holding the scrap of red blanket she called her grumpy, though none of us knew why. She had it bunched in her fist while she sucked her thumb.

  Behind her came Mom, carrying a bag in each hand. She leaned into my room and whispered so Bumble wouldn’t hear. “Dad says he’s found us.”

  I felt a tingle inside me. Had my birthday wish come true?

  “Hurry,” said Mom. She stuffed one of the bags under her arm, took my sister’s hand, and told her as cheerfully as she could, “Let’s go downstairs, Bumblebee.”

  I threw back my blankets and grabbed my clothes from the floor, everything except my socks. I always slept in my socks. Automatically, I checked to make sure my emergency money was folded inside. My lifeline, Dad called it.

  As I pulled on my pants, I heard a creak of wood from the hallway. It was the sort of noise the house made all the time, but I thought about how I was now alone upstairs and my imagination went a little crazy. I pictured the Lizard Man hiding in my closet, watching me through the slits in the louvered panel, and I was afraid he would come leaping out at me.

  Slowly, I turned the handle. Then I yanked the door open, snatched my old Nike bag from the floor, and backed away. I stuffed my schoolwork inside it and hurried downstairs.

  On the bottom step, my mom and my sister were cuddled together. Bumble had pinned a plastic barrette in her hair, a yellow duck with black eyes that jiggled as she looked up. “We’re bugging out,” she said.

  That was my father’s expression. He liked to talk like a soldier leading a raid or something. “We’re good to go.” “We’re bugging out.” It sounded better than “fleeing into the night” or “running away and starting over again.” Poor Bumble still thought this was just the normal way of living. She had been doing it all her life and never wondered why.

  Dad had turned on just enough lights that he could see his way through the house. It was so quiet that I could hear the tiny ticking of the clock. Five minutes to three. I went to the window beside the front door and peered between the curtains.

  “You shouldn’t do that!” yelled Bumble, knowing the rules. “Mom, he shouldn’t do that!”

  “Yes, come away from there,” said Mom. But I pretended not to hear. If the Lizard Man was out there, I wanted to see him. I imagined him standing boldly on the sidewalk, in the cone of yellow light that fell from the streetlamp, with his shadow splotched on the pavement. But no one was there.

  I had never seen the Lizard Man. Neither had my mom. It was always Dad who knew he was watching us, who found his footprints in wet grass or heard him creeping past our curtained windows.

  In the garage, the car’s trunk closed with an echoing whump. A moment later, Dad came up through the kitchen.

  “Let’s roll,” he said.

  Mom tucked Bumble under her arm like a little bird, and they went running down the three steps to the garage. I picked up my gym bag. Dad ushered me through the kitchen and down to the car. He shoved me through the back door, onto the floor beside Bumble, and covered us both with a blanket.

  As always, he went back into the house one more time. Maybe, in a crazy way, he felt he had to make sure the stove was turned off. Or maybe he just had to be the last to leave, like the captain of his sinking ship. In a minute he was back, panting as he slid into the driver’s seat. He locked the doors and started the engine.

  I heard the garage door thump. Like a castle’s drawbridge, it rumbled open. Dad backed out onto the street, switched into drive, and sped away from the house.

  For half an hour he drove here and there, around corner after corner like a mouse running through a maze. For all I knew, there might have been a dozen cars racing after us. The only thing I could see was the floor. Then Dad stopped the car and sighed and said, “Okay. We’re not being followed. I think we’re safe.”

  Bumble and I popped out from under the blanket. Dad had parked in the bright gleam of lights at a 7-Eleven. In the window was a hot dog machine, with shriveled old dogs riding around and around like seniors on a Ferris wheel. The clerk—wearing a little paper hat—stared at us mindlessly through the red glow.

  Dad went inside to use the pay phone. He had to report in to the people he called the Protectors, to tell them we were on the run again, so they could arrange for a new place to hide us. When he came back he cranked the car’s heater up to high and started driving.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  He answered as he always did, with his favorite motto. “The less you know, the better.”

  WHAT THE MONKEY SAID

  We each had our kit, our one bag that we kept packed and ready to go. Along with the stuff that Dad stored in the car, the bags held everything we needed to pass from one life into another. It was always funny to see what tiny thing Bumble added to hers after Mom had finished packing it. Once there was a rock; once there was a penny. This time it was a hardened piece of gum that she’d scraped off the sidewalk, thinking it was a diamond.

  I had a few clothes and two pairs of shoes, and that was just about all I owned. I didn’t have a computer, a cell phone, an iPad, or anything like that. Dad thought those things could be used to track us, so he banned them from our lives. The only thing he allowed was the spy phone. That was my name for Mom’s fancy landline telephone that Dad had ordered from some shady place on the internet. It didn’t show up on people’s call displays, and it had a number that was not only unlisted, it didn’t even exist. At least that’s how Dad explained it. He was actually kind of proud of the spy phone. “The CIA would need at least two weeks to trace that thing,” he’d told us.

  Mom used it for her job. She was a telemarketer, selling ocean cruises to people too polite to hang up. Even as we worked our way east, zigzagging across the country, she kept making her calls. She plugged in that phone for an hour or two every evening at whatever motel Dad had chosen for the night and started dialing numbers. When somebody answered she shouted, “Ahoy there!” After a while it all seemed unreal, her voice repeating the same shtick in a different place that seemed a lot like the place before. I lost track of where we were. I lost track of time, and suddenly Mom didn’t bother to plug in her phone one day.

  It was Christmas Eve.

  We were holed up in a room with orange walls and an orange carpet. The TV, the coffeemaker, and the microwave were chained to the wall.

  “Well, it isn’t much, but I guess it’ll do,” said Mom when Bumble had been put to bed in the other room. “I don’t think anyone could ever find us here.”

  She didn’t know how thin the walls were in that place. The bedroom door opened and Bumble came out. She shouted in her squeaky voice, “No one?”

  “Not even Waldo,” said Dad, which made no sense. He didn’t always get his cultural references right.

  My sister started crying. Mom sat beside her on the green sofa, pulled her close and asked, “What’s the matter, Bumblebee?”

  My sister kept wailing. “Santa Claus can’t find us!”

  I laughed—until Dad gave me a dirty look. “Oh, your mother’s only kidding,” he said. “I’m sure Santa has his ways.”

  It was like admitting there was a chink in the armor, that we weren’t really all that safe af
ter all. But Bumble didn’t notice. Her tears vanished, and she was happy again.

  I went to sleep hoping I would dream of Greenaway. It was a town that didn’t exist, a cover story invented by Dad, to be told to anyone who asked where we came from. But in my dreams it had become a real place where kids played baseball in the sunset, where all the neighbors got together for backyard barbecues, and I would wake up believing for a moment that I was living there.

  But that night I didn’t dream at all.

  In the morning a sad little pile of presents lay wrapped under the TV. There was a sweater for Mom and a tie for Dad, and for me a pair of huge snow boots with big dangling buckles. “Thanks,” I said. “So this means we’re not moving to Florida?” Bumble got the ugliest doll I’d ever seen, a mutant, googly-eyed monkey that might have escaped from a horror movie. I grimaced when I saw it, but my sister loved that thing. She carried it around everywhere she went and gave it the name of George. I called it Hideous George.

  For Christmas dinner we ate a precooked chicken that came in a plastic dome, a tub of coleslaw, and little brown potatoes packed in a pouch like baby kangaroos. As we ate we watched TV, but we kept the sound turned down to a murmur so Dad could listen for footsteps and car engines.

  Later, Bumble put Hideous George to bed. She tucked her grumpy around his chin, curled up beside him, and spent a long time whispering into his ear like he was actually talking back to her. When she turned toward us she looked very serious. “George wants to stay home next Christmas,” she said.

  “Oh, does he?” asked Mom.

  Bumble nodded solemnly. “He doesn’t like traveling around. He just wants to stay home.”

  It was pretty obvious she was talking about herself. But Mom and Dad pretended not to know that.

  “I think George will be very happy when he gets settled into a new house,” said Mom. “Who knows—he might have a tree in the backyard and a tire to swing on.”

  Bumble whispered that bit of news into the monkey’s ear, then listened to his answer. “He says he’s scared he’ll have to bug out again,” she said. “He wants to stay in one place forever.”