Free The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn Page A

truck, where Dad bandaged my legs and Aaron’s cheek as best he could.
    It wasn’t until we were in the pickup driving home that Dad mentioned the metal box Aaron still had in his hands, and the huge knife.
    “You want to tell me about these?” he said quietly. We didn’t. It would have meant telling him that our curiosity had nearly killed us. But in the end, we told him everything.
    “Unmarked territory,” Dad muttered. “And I thought I was the one taking chances.”

A S SOON AS WE RETURNED from the camping trip, Mom hustled us back into the car and drove us straight to Dr. Trumble’s office. He stitched up two cuts on my leg and a deep one on Aaron’s cheek. We both were going to have scars. Aaron was thrilled—he thought it would make him look like a pirate.
    The metal box sat unopened on our bedroom dresser. The box was built as solid as a safe, and its key was lost forever under the moss. I asked Lola to come over to take a shot at it.
    Lola had never been in our house before. I watched her nervously as she walked through the front door. She stumbled a bit on the tilting floor and then stood as still as a marble statue as hereyes scanned the words, numbers, and diagrams on the walls. A smile flitted across her face, but she hid it quickly.
    “It’s even weirder than I thought,” she said.
    We went up to my room and tried prying the box open, but we succeeded only in breaking one of Dad’s best screwdrivers and one of Mom’s butter knives. Lola ran home and came back with one of her mom’s oyster forks. We broke that, too. Her mom noticed. Apparently, she polishes the silverware once a week.
    We took a break from the box and went outside to ride bikes until dinnertime. When Mom called us in, I left my bike lying on our front lawn, just a few feet from our porch steps. When I went out to get it after dinner, it was gone. I was sure I knew who’d stolen it.
    The Purple Door Man collected junk and hated kids. He wasn’t one of those guys who seemed grumpy until you got to know him and then realized he was gruff but lovable. He was gruff all right, but he definitely wasn’t lovable. At least once a day, he yelled at us to stop making so much noise.
    But that’s not all he did. He stole from us.
    To be fair to the Purple Door Man, it started with the toys we left in front of his house. We’d step inside for lunch and come back out to find our Frisbee or football gone.
    At first, we figured some kid cruising through our neighborhood had picked them up. Or maybe we had left them somewhere else. Then it started happening more often and it started happening even if the toys had been in our yard.
    Now, two weeks after the horrible camping trip, my bike disappeared from in front of our house.
    I felt sick. It was the middle of summer. My birthday and Christmas were months away, and here I was stuck with nothing to ride.
    The Purple Door Man yelled to me from his front porch, “Sad about your bike, eh, sonny?”
    “What? Did you see who took it?” I asked anxiously.
    “I’m not sayin’,” he said, “but it serves you right for all the noise you kids are always makin’!”
    From the way the Purple Door Man said this, I knew he’d been the one who’d stolen my bike. He smiled.
    In less than a week, Aaron’s and Lola’s bikes disappeared, too.
    I told Mom about my suspicion. She frowned and said it might be so. She even said she would talk to the Purple Door Man, but I could tell she didn’t think it would do much good.
    Then something happened that night that made Mom forget all about our bikes. That was the night we ordered pizza from Big Sam’s Pizzeria.
    The pizza we ordered never arrived. After ninety minutes, I called the restaurant to complain. Big Sam apologized and told me, “Don’t worry, little one. Big Sam’s policy is ‘If the pizza isn’t delivered in half an hour, you don’t have to pay.’ ” He asked for precise directions, which we gave him, but still the delivery guy