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As if sensing her line of thought, Gomez said, ‘We will find a new homeland. Somewhere exotic. Somewhere magical. Somewhere that’s truly … us.’
‘Oh,’ Morticia breathed. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
Gomez smiled back at her. ‘Yes, my dear. We both know where we must go.’
New Jersey did not disappoint.
It was barbaric, uncultured, crass, confusing and dirty. And it smelled bad. Everywhere.
‘Unhappy, darling?’ Gomez asked, catching Morticia’s hand and kissing it as they tore along a country road in the dead of night. The trees were tall. The hills were rolling. The moon glinted through the dead marsh grass, where it was reflected in the fetid swamp water on either side of the road.
It smelled terrible. Morticia loved this state.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, ‘I’m terribly unhappy. It’s wonderful.’
But now that the honeymoon was over … Morticia sighed.
‘Darling,’ Gomez said, looking concerned. ‘Is that a wrinkle I see on your pallid brow? What’s wrong?’
Morticia clutched his hand. Thing yanked the wheel, and the limo tore round another curve. A dense fog had suddenly gathered, shrouding the road in dark mist. It was impossible to see further than two metres down the road. New Jersey! What a charming place.
‘We can’t run forever, my love,’ Morticia replied. ‘I want a home again. I want our children to grow up in peace. I want to pick out cemetery plots.’
Whump!
The car gave a huge lurch as it hit something heavy, then screeched to a stop at the side of the road.
Morticia, Gomez and Thing hurried out of the car. About fifteen metres back, a huge body was lying in the centre of the road. It was an enormous man wearing a hospital gown and a straitjacket. He was out cold.
Gomez turned him over. The back of the straitjacket had the words STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE stencilled on it.
Morticia looked up, and – how had she missed it before? The fog had parted for a moment. Looming up from the top of a hill beyond a wrought-iron gate was a Gothic monstrosity. A hulking, ornate wreck of a building set just far back enough from the road to feel really unfriendly. It had a crooked steeple and a million broken windows. Sudden lightning lit up the sky, and the house seemed to bend and warp in the flickering light.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Morticia said. ‘A decent place to sleep for the night.’
A faded sign hanging from the gate banged in the wind. STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE, it read. The building had clearly been lying empty for a long time, with the apparent exception of the hulking wreck of a man they’d struck with their car.
Said wreck was now peeling himself off the pavement and lumbering towards Morticia and Gomez. His arms were held stiffly out in front of him, and he gave a cavernous howl.
‘NNNNYYYAAAAAGH,’ the hulk roared. He was close enough to crush Morticia and Gomez in one motion.
Gomez smiled cheerfully and stuffed their bags into his hands.
‘Thank you, old boy,’ he said. ‘Lead the way!’
The monster looked down at the bags, surprised. Then he shrugged and led Morticia and Gomez through the gate and towards the abandoned insane asylum.
Morticia smiled happily. How convenient that they had found a house that already had a butler! She watched him lurch up the path. Lurch … what a perfect name. Lurch the butler.
Morticia took Gomez’s arm, and they followed Lurch to the front door of the house. Gomez gallantly swept the POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS tape away from the front door, and they stepped in.
Stale, cold air and absolute silence greeted them. Then a faint sound came through the blackness: the scratching of rats scampering in the walls.
Morticia’s eyes adjusted to the dark. She squinted down the front hall. There was a chalk outline of a body near the staircase.
‘It’s creepy,’ Gomez said thoughtfully. ‘Kooky.’
Morticia looked up and caught the eye of a stuffed moose head. It winked at her.
‘Mysterious,’ she agreed. ‘Spooky.’
Plop! Plop! Blood dripped from the ceiling.
Gomez brushed a spider the size of a pigeon off his shoulder. ‘It’s altogether … what’s the word?’ he murmured, looking thoughtful.
Lurch lumbered up to the pipe organ at the top of the grand staircase. Thing scurried over and hopped up on to the keyboard. Together, the two of them plunkedout the few notes of a decidedly twisted little tune.
‘GETTTTT OUTTTTT,’ a voice like a sinking ship moaned, interrupting the music. It seemed to come from every hall, from every nook and every cranny. The whole house trembled.
Morticia and Gomez jumped.
‘It’s hideous!’ Morticia exclaimed.
‘It’s horrible!’ Gomez agreed.
‘It’s home,’ they sighed in unison. Gomez dipped Morticia into a dramatic kiss in the doorway of their dream house, and Lurch took up the odd little tune again, with Thing snapping in cheerful rhythm.
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Thirteen Years Later …
A THICK FOG still wrapped itself around the hill. Anyone passing by the wrought-iron gate would be surprised to discover that a hulking house lurked beyond the blanket of mist. But nobody ever stopped to investigate … and nobody had even noticed that the old asylum sign had been replaced with a new sign:
THE ADDAMS FAMILY
The sun was rising, but no light reached the house at the top of the hill. The clouds cloaked it far too snugly. And to make matters worse – or better, if you were an Addams – a torrential downpour was falling on this particular morning.
Morticia threw open the window and smiled as a sheet of freezing rain hit her square in the face.
‘What a lovely morning!’ she exclaimed cheerfully. The window slammed itself shut, barely missing Morticia’s fingers. She smiled slyly.
‘Nice try,’ she murmured. The spirit of the house had been doing its best to wound, maim or kill the Addamses since they’d moved in. Morticia found it extremely charming. She’d always wanted to live in a haunted house – you were never home alone with a poltergeist, after all.
‘GET OUUUUT!’ The hollow, echoing scream floated through the corridors. Morticia rolled her eyes affectionately.
‘Oh, you’re always so grumpy before your morning coffee,’ she said. She picked up the coffee pot she’d brought upstairs from the kitchen for just this purpose and walked into the bathroom.
Plsh – Morticia carefully poured the steaming black coffee into the toilet and flushed it.
‘Better?’ she asked.
‘AAAAAAAAAAH,’ sighed the house. The floorboards and rafters creaked softly as the entire building settled down and began to vibrate very gently.
Morticia patted the door frame affectionately.
The house had been fed. Now it was time for the children. She pressed a button on a call box mounted on the wall.
‘Lurch,’ Morticia murmured into the speaker, ‘it’s time for breakfast.’
Several storeys down, in the sub-sub-basement of the former asylum, Lurch sat on his bed, reading. It had been thirteen years since the Addamses had hit him with their car on that fateful night, and he had been their loyal butler ever since. It beat wandering around an abandoned mental asylum, after all. Lurch gently placed the book next to his other books and groaned as he sat up. With a great creaking and popping of joints, the hulking zombie of a man stood up and shuffled out of the padded cell he called a bedroom, his head scraping along the mattress-covered ceiling.
Morticia’s next stop was the office, to find Thing. The disembodied hand jumped when she opened the door.
‘Thing!’ Morticia said. ‘Get Ichabod to wake the children.’
She swept down the hallway, and Thing scuttled along ahead of her, swinging open a window and nimbly climbing out of it. Meanwhile, Morticia continued her morning rounds. She caught up with Lurch as he emerged from the kitchen with the breakfast tray. Once the meal was on the table, Morticia sent Lurch off on another task.
‘It’s time to begin dusting up for the party,’ she said. There wasn’t that much time left before the big event, and Morticia wanted everything to look perfect. Lurch nodded and obediently headed down the hall to fetch the vacuum cleaner. He looked at the wall critically as he went – a single droplet of blood was trickling down the wallpaper. Lurch shook his head and sighed. Poltergeists. He banged the wall a couple of times with his fist, and the entire surface began oozing blood.
There, that was better.
The old, broken vacuum cleaner was stored in the cupboard off the pantry. When Lurch turned it on, it began spewing dust all over everything. Lurch nodded in satisfaction. He carefully pointed it at the sofa, then at the candelabra, then finally at the picture frames on the wall. Soon the room was coated in a thick blanket of stale-smelling dust. It looked perfect. Lurch almost smiled, his cheeks creaking stiffly, before his face went back to its usual wooden blankness. He continued dusting.
The racket of the vacuum cleaner roared through the west wing of the house, but on the second storey, in the east wing, everything was quiet and peaceful. Two children slept snug in their beds. Ten-year-old Pugsley was huddled under his covers, his head shoved under his pillow. Nearby, in her own room, his thirteen-year-old sister Wednesday slept sweetly in a bed rigged beneath a guillotine, her bare neck stretched out under the razor-sharp blade.
First the window to Pugsley’s room slid open, then the window to Wednesday’s. As the two children slept, wooden tentacles slipped into their rooms through the open windows. Smooth, grasping vines crept across the floor and hovered for a moment over the children’s sleeping forms.
Then, with a mighty SNAP,the branches sprang into action. They twined round the kids and tore them from their beds, pulling them out of their windows and dangling them in the air six metres above the ground!
‘AAAAAHHHH!’shrieked Wednesday and Pugsley. The tree, whose branches were holding the children like rag dolls, quaked in silent laughter.
Wednesday recovered first. ‘All right, Ichabod,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I’m awake.’
The tree – Ichabod – gave her a gentle shake, as though to say Good morning!
‘Not for long,’ Pugsley commented, flinging a hatchet at his sister cheerfully. Wednesday snatched it out of the air before it hit her and twirled it in her fingers. ‘Really mature, Pugsley,’ she said scornfully. She sighed, bored. The Addams family had a proud tradition of doing their best to kill each other. They never succeeded, of course, but it was fun to try, and a healthy spirit of competition (and mortal peril) kept the days lively. But Pugsley’s attempt with the hatchet had been lacklustre. It took more than a badly thrown axe to really wake Wednesday up.
‘How I wish something would liven up this already tedious day,’ she said, and yawned.
Ichabod gave a tree-ish shrug and tossed Pugsley through the air towards the house. Pugsley sailed through his open window and landed on his bed with an ‘Oof!’
Wednesday tilted her head. ‘Thanks for trying, Ichabod,’ she said. She patted the branch that was still holding her. The tree gently let her down, and she wandered back to the house.
But before Wednesday could make it very far, a strange noise caught her attention.
Brrrring! Brrring!
It sounded like … a bicycle bell? And it was coming from down the hill, where the driveway gate separated the house grounds from the local road.
Wednesday wandered down through the permanent bank of fog towards the gate. She’d never heard anything other than the occasional noisy car motor, and she was curious. Who was there? Had someone stopped at the gate? Why? The fog thickened as she got closer to the gate; soon it was impossible to see further than two metres in front of her.
Brrring! Brrring!
The bicycle bell sounded again. Someone was hidden in the fog on the other side of the gate and was ringing their bell. In a strange way, it felt like someone was saying hello.
Reaching through the dense fog, Wednesday knocked on the gate in reply.
Clang. Clang.
Wednesday held her breath and listened as closely as she could. A soft gasp sounded from the fog on the other side of the gate. Someone was there! Then Wednesday heard the sound of pedals turning, a bicycle chain going taut and the low hiss of rubber bicycle wheels against the pavement.
Whoever it was, was riding away.
Disappointed, Wednesday turned and headed back up through the moat of fog to the towering house on the hill, where breakfast was waiting.
Back at the house, Pugsley was hiding in the top room of the tallest tower of the house. He had a trunk full of explosives next to him, and a telescope in his hand. He peered through the telescope, seeking, seeking – aha! There he was.
‘Pugsley! Pugsley!’ Below, in the garden, Gomez Addams wandered around the house grounds looking for his son. ‘Pugsley!’
Up in the tower, Pugsley smiled. ‘Let the games begin,’ he murmured.
‘Pugsley!’ Gomez called as he rounded the side of the house and headed towards the hedge. ‘It’s time for sword practice!’
Flooom!
Behind Gomez, a great plume of smoke and fire emerged from the house as a rocket launched from the tower. Pugsley, riding the rocket like a bronco, gave a great ‘Yee-haw!’ as it tore into the sky. The rocket shot straight up, then slowed and reached the top of its trajectory. For one breathless moment, it hung perfectly still in the air. Pugsley held on tightly as the rocket began to fall. Faster, faster, it sped down to earth, aimed straight at Gomez.
‘Death to the oppressor!’ Pugsley screeched as the missile neared his father.
At the last moment, Gomez dodged backwards. Pugsley yanked the rocket’s nose up so it wouldn’t crash into the ground and rode it into the sky for another dive. His father stumbled, recovering from his first dodge, as Pugsley drove the rocket at him again. Gomez ducked again – another near miss. He sprang back to his feet and shook his head impatiently.
‘All right, son, that’s enough,’ Gomez said sternly.
But Pugsley couldn’t hear him. The rocket was sailing up, up, up, spiralling out of control as it tore into the clouds. Gomez watched with some curiosity as it disappeared into the clouds, and then …
Boom!
A distant explosion flashed high above as the rocket finally exploded. Gomez squinted into the sunlight, scanning the sky for his son.
‘YeaaaaaAAAAAGH!’ Pugsley appeared, his scream getting louder and louder as he fell closer and closer to earth. When he was only about thirty metres above the ground, Pugsley yanked the cord on his emergency parachute vest, and a large silk parachute popped open above him. He dangled in the air, gliding gently and slowly downwards.
Not wasting a moment, Pugsley pulled out his slingshot and a handful of small explosive mines and began hurling the mines at his father. Blam! Blam! Blam! They landed around Gomez as he danced and dodged and finally fled.
‘Don’t make me come up there!’ Gomez shouted at Pugsley, who sailed through the sky hanging from his parachute, shooting down more mines at his father.
‘This is your last warning!’ Gomez called, still running.
Pugsley rummaged in his pocket. Only one mine left. He fitted it into the strap of his slingshot and pulled it back, taking aim carefully. As Pugsley released the mine, Gomez produced a baseball bat out of nowhere and turned to face the incoming explosive. He waggled the bat, took a batting stance, and waited.
