Houseng Problem

I grabbed Jackie and held her tight. She felt pretty bad, too. You wouldn’t think that a tiny TO LET sign could make so much differ­ence.

“What’ll Mr. 1-lenchard say’?” Jackie asked, watching me with big eyes.

Mr. Henchard came home two nights later. We were sitting by the fire when he walked in, his Gladstone swinging, the black cigarette holder jutting from below his beak. “Mph,” he greeted us.

“Hello,” I said weakly. “Glad you’re back.”

“Claptrap!” said Mr. Henchard firmly as he headed for his room. Jackie and I looked at one another.

Mr. Henchard squalled in sheer fury. His twisted face appeared around the door.

“Busybodies!” he snarled. “I told you—”

‘Wait a minute,” I said.

“I’m moving Out!” Mr. Henchard barked. “Now!” His head popped

back out of sight; the door slammed and locked. Jackie and I waited, half expecting to be spanked.

Mr. Henchard bounced out of his room, Gladstone suspended from one hand. He whirled past us toward the door.

I tried to stop him. “Mr. Henchard—”

“Claptrap!”

Jackie pulled at one arm, I got a grip on the other. Between us, we managed to bring him to a stop.

“Wait,” I said. “You’ve forgotten your—uh—bird cage.”

“That’s what you think,” he snarled at me. “You can have it. Med­dlers! It took me months to build that little house just right, and months more to coax ‘em to live in it. Now you’ve spoiled it. They won’t be back.”

‘Who?” Jackie gulped.

His beady eyes were fixed malignantly on us. “My tenants. I’ll have to build a new house now—ha! But this time I won’t leave it within reach of meddlers.”

‘Wait,” I said. “Are—are you a m-magician?”

Mr. Henchard snorted. “I’m a good craftsman. That’s all it takes. You treat them right, and they’ll treat you right. Still—” And he gleamed a bit with pride. “—it isn’t everybody who knows how to build the right sort of house for them!”

He seemed to be softening, but my next question roused him again.

‘9AThat were they?” he snapped. “The Little Folk, of course. Call ‘em what you like. Nixie, pixie, leprechaun, brownie—they’ve had lots of names. But they want a quiet, respectable neighborhood to live in, not a lot of peeping and prying. Gives the property a bad name. No wonder they moved out! And—mph!—they paid their rent on time, too. Still, the Little Folk always do,” he added.

“Rent?” Jackie said faintly.

“Luck,” Mr. Henchard said. “Good luck. What did you expect they’d pay in—money? Now I’ll have to build another house to get my special luck back.”

He gave us one parting glare, jerked open the door, and stamped out. We stood looking after him. The bus was pulling into the gas station down the slope, and Mr. Henchard broke into a run.

He caught the bus, all right, but only after he’d fallen flat on his face.

I put my arm around Jackie.

“Oh, gosh,” she said. “His bad luck’s working already.”

“Not bad,” I pointed out. “Just normal. When you rent a little house to pixies, you get a lot of extra good luck.”

We sat in silence, watching each other. Finally without saying a word, we went into Mr. Henchard’s vacated room. The bird cage was still there. So was the house. So was the TO LET sign.

“Let’s go to Terry’s,” I said.

We stayed later than usual. Anybody would have thought we didn’t want to go home because we lived in a haunted house. Except that in our case the exact opposite was true. Our house wasn’t haunted any more. It was horribly, desolately, coldly vacant.

I didn’t say anything till we’d crossed the highway, climbed the slope, and unlocked our front door. We went, I don’t know why, for a final look at the empty house. The cover was back on the cage, where I’d replaced it, but—thump, rustle, pop! The house was tenanted again!

We backed out and closed the door before we breathed.

“No,” Jackie said. “We mustn’t look. We mustn’t ever, ever, look un­der that cover.”

“Never,” I said. “Who do you suppose . . .“

We caught a very faint murmur of what seemed to be boisterous sing­ing. That was fine. The happier they were, the longer they’d stay. When we went to bed, I dreamed that I was drinking beer with Rip Van Winkle and the dwarfs. I drank ‘em all under the table.

It was unimportant that the next morning was rainy. We were con­vinced that bright yellow sunlight was blazing in through the windows. I sang under the shower. Jackie burbled inarticulately and joyously. We didn’t open Mr. Henchard’s door.

“Maybe they want to sleep late,” I said.

It’s always noisy in the machine-shop, and a hand-truckload of rough cylinder casings going past doesn’t increase the din noticeably. At three o’clock that afternoon, one of the boys was rolling the stuff along to­ward the storeroom, and I didn’t hear it or see it until I’d stepped back from my planer, cocking my eye at its adjustment.

Those big planers are minor juggernauts. They have to be bedded in concrete, in heavy thigh-high cradles on which a heavily weighted metal monster—the planer itself—slides back and forth.