Once Upon a Midnight Eerie: Book #2 (Misadventures of Edgar/Allan) Read Free Page A

live cat,” Allan explained to the driver. “But now he’s more like a stuffed toy.”
    “Yeah, don’t you recognize expert taxidermy when you see it?” asked Edgar.
    The driver narrowed his eyes.
    Edgar and Allan had taught Roderick many tricks. Just two weeks before, in Kansas, Roderick had saved their lives by unknotting a rope on command (the cue being the twins whistling “Ring Around the Rosy”). Additionally, Roderick could imitate the sound of a monkey whenever his masters said the words “tree swinger,” the barking of a dog whenever they said “poochie,” and the crying of a baby whenever they said “spilled milk.” But his greatest feat was what the boys called “The Stuffed Cat”—Roderick would tighten his muscles and freeze, glassing over his eyeballs, for up to three minutes or until the boys released him with a snap of their fingers. His cue was the phrase “downright frozen.”
    So this was what Roderick was doing now.
    “You mean taxidermy as in
dead
?” the driver asked, looking at Roderick’s motionless head and eyes. “Like the stuffed animals in the natural history museum? Or a hunting lodge?”
    Allan nodded. “‘Taxidermy,’ an early nineteenth-century word, derived from the Greek—”
    “
Taxis
meaning ‘arrangement,’ and
derma
meaning ‘skin,’” Edgar finished.
    By now, a trio of female tourists, all wearing matching shirts and too much perfume, had gathered around the twins.
    Edgar removed the stiff, motionless cat from the backpack and held it toward the driver. “Want to hold him?”
    The man stepped back.
    “My, he looks so real,” said one of the ladies.
    “We’re
very
good taxidermists,” Edgar said.
    The driver took a deep breath. “Well, I guess a stuffed cat can stay.”
    “Thanks, sir.”
    Grunting, the man turned and clambered down the spiral staircase. A few moments later, the bus lurched to a start, veering into the traffic outside the tourist office.
    The Poe twins turned to the trio atop the bus and winked. “Watch this, ladies,” they said, snapping their fingers.
    Roderick suddenly came back to life, meowing and purring.
    The women jumped, startled.
    Then they started laughing. “Nice trick, boys!”
    “Hey, it’s Roderick you should be complimenting,” Allan said.

    Settled in their seats, with Roderick curled between them, the twins soaked up the November sun as the bus pulled away from Jackson Square. It was warmer here than in Baltimore, where their friends would be bundled now in winter coats and mittens.
    Allan and Edgar wore T-shirts.
    Nothing beat a winter day spent in the warm sun, except maybe a school day spent out of school.
    This was both.
    It had been almost six weeks since Edgar and Allan were expelled from Aldrin Middle School, victims of Professor Perry’s lies. Since then, they had not only traveled to Kansas, rescued their cat, and escaped the professor’s plan for their destruction, but, in doing so, had also earned a handwritten letter from the Baltimore superintendent of schools inviting them to return to class. Of course, in the meantime, Mr. Wender had asked them to be movie actors.
    So school had to wait.
    They didn’t miss the homework or the tests, which for Edgar and Allan were always too easy to be of much interest.
    But they missed their friends.
    So when the red double-decker bus drove past the magnificent old mansions on St. Charles Avenue, they thought of Katie Justus. She wanted to be an architect and spent most of her free time drawing pictures of houses with stately columns and century-old ivy, just like these.
    And when the bus stopped on Magazine Street so that everyone could disembark for a lunch of po’ boy sandwiches (a famous New Orleans specialty consisting of roast beef or fried oysters or shrimp on a toasted French roll), the boys wished their best friend Stevie “The Hulk” Harrison was there too. He’d probably eat three or four, if given the chance. And they regarded the sandwiches