The Monsters of Morley Manor Read Free

over Sarah gave up bugging me about how much money I owed her—probably because she could tell I was in such a totally bad mood it wouldn’t do her any good.
    I took the box into my room and slammed the door behind me. Then I got out my set of miniature screwdrivers. Grampa Walker had given them to me for my last birthday, which had been just a month before he died. He gave them to me because I had always liked to play with them when I visited him at the farm. He used to use them for the model railroads he liked to build, but he had dropped that hobby when his hands got too shaky.
    Sometimes I wondered if the reason he had passed them on to me was that he knew he was going to die soon.
    After carefully unwrapping the screwdrivers, which Grampa had kept folded in a black cloth pouch, I began to study the box. How was I supposed to open the thing? I tried sticking the smallest screwdriver into the keyhole and wiggling it around. No luck I didn’t want to break the lock, though I was willing to do that if I had to. But I wasn’t sure I could do it without damaging the wood, and that I did not want to do.
    I turned the box around to examine the hinges. They were held on by tiny screws. Still using the smallest of the screwdrivers, I tried to loosen them.
    As I was working, the box seemed to get warmer, which was truly weird. I thought about stopping, but my curiosity had the best of me, and I was dying to see what was inside. After a lot of fussing, I managed to get the screws out. Then I pried the hinges off.
    The darn box
still
wouldn’t open.
    Frustrated, I poked the tip of a slightly larger screwdriver between the lid and the body of the box and tried to ease them apart. Just when I was about to stop, for fear of breaking Grampa’s screwdriver, the lid made a horrible squeak and moved up about a half an inch. At the same time my desk lamp began to flicker.
    Again, I thought about stopping.
    It was too late. Something like fog came pouring over the edge of the box, and a green glow showed through the opening. Suddenly a crackle of tingling energy shot up my fingers.
    â€œYow!” I cried.
    When I let go of the lid it slammed back onto the body of the box so fast it was almost as if it had been sucked down.
    I stared at the box, torn between terror and a deep curiosity. When I finally got up enough courage, I reached forward and touched it again, just a little tap with the tip of my finger.
    I pulled my hand back quickly.
    Nothing happened.
    I tried again.
    Still nothing.
    Must have been some weird buildup of static electricity
, I told myself. But I wasn’t entirely convinced. I decided to go get something to eat, mostly as a way of putting off making a decision about opening the box. Part of me had begun to think it was a bad idea. Part of me was dying to see what was inside. (And yet another part of me was afraid that once I did get it open, I would find nothing interesting at all, which was a different kind of scary.)
    I had lunch, then watched some cartoons with Sarah, which is fun, because you can really bug her by telling her how stupid the plots for
Scooby-Doo
always are.
    Two hours later I went back into my room.
It’s just a box, for pete’s sake!
I told myself.
    Even so, I was plenty nervous as I slid it toward me to try to open it again.
    The lid creaked as I pried it up, but this time there was no fog, no tingle. I did see the green glow again, but it vanished as soon as I got the lid all the way open—sort of the reverse of the light in the refrigerator.
    Underneath the lid was . . . another lid! This one was made of wood, too, though a lighter shade, and had a pair of knobs, one on each side, which I figured were for lifting it out. Painted in the center was a fancy circle. In the center of the circle, written in bold black letters, were the words MARTIN MORLEY’S LITTLE MONSTERS .
    Below that, in very fine print, it said, OPEN NOT THIS BOX LEST MY CURSE FALL