Batneezer: The Creature From My Closet

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  To Anodyne, Hagan, Sonora & Willow—Four Amazing Human Beings

  CHAPTER 1

  ANTICIPATION

  To begin with, Seussol is gone. There is no doubt about that. I saw him return to the closet over a month ago with my own eyes. And according to Beardy, my doorknob, he is gone for good. I miss my last visitor.

  I am sad he’s gone, but I’m also excited because it’s December 21st, and that means there are only three more days before my closet opens again and the next creature arrives. I never had a heads-up in the past. All five of the creatures who came before were a surprise. But now, thanks to a tool Seussol made me, I’m able to unlock Beardy and see the date of the next arrival. Most people are pumped for the twenty-fifth. Me, I’m stoked for the twenty-fourth.

  I’m actually happy about a lot of things right now. It’s not often that I think my life is perfect, but at this exact moment, it’s pretty close to that. For starters, I’m psyched that winter break begins in two days.

  I love winter break—two weeks off from school and a couple of holidays mixed in. I’m also happy that Christmas is so close. I’m hopeful I might get some of the things I asked for this year.

  Thanks to my closet, my life has become weird and unpredictable, and I have to admit I’ve grown to like the interruptions.

  I’m kind of an average height, and I’m sort of an average-looking guy. I have average grades and I’m an average basketball player, but my life is no longer what it used to be. Let me give you the scoop.

  My name is Robert Columbo Burnside. I have an older sister named Libby, a younger brother named Tuffin, and a mom and a dad. I have a fat dog named Puck and a pooping bird named Fred. I live on a street near a cul-de-sac. In the center of the cul-de-sac, there is a rock island with three palm trees growing in the middle of it. I have five friends who live in the cul-de-sac, and I hang out with them all the time.

  The girl I like lives next door to me. Her name is Janae, and recently we’ve been getting along great. I mean, really great. She’s even admitted to others without being forced that I’m her boyfriend.

  If you don’t already know about my closet, I’ll quickly fill you in. When I was little, it had no door and I created a homemade laboratory inside it. It was like my science cave. I would mix mayonnaise and motor oil and spread them over things in an attempt to find a cure for stuff like Older-Sister-Itis.

  My potions never really worked. So I stopped trying to invent things, and my closet just got messier and goopier. Then my mom got a part-time job working in a bookstore. She said it was because she wanted to have something to do, but we all knew it was because she had three kids and wanted to get out of the house. She didn’t work at the bookstore for too long, but while she did, she would bring home books for us all to read. I didn’t like reading, so I would just take my books and throw them into my messy closet. I was pretty proud of how disgusting the inside of my closet was.

  But then things changed.

  My dad found a strange door at a garage sale down the street. He brought it home and hung it on my closet. It’s weird because it fit perfectly. It’s also weird because it’s … weird. It’s a super-heavy closet door that looks older than dirt. It has an embarrassing unicorn sticker on it that I can’t get off and a funny metal doorknob. On the front of the doorknob there’s an engraved face of a bearded man I call Beardy.

  His real name is Bartholomew, but if you read Lord of the Hat, you already knew that. Anyhow, soon after the closet door was installed, magical things began to happen. Beardy would lock the door and wouldn’t let me or my friends in. Then the books and the mess behind the door would tumble and mix with the sticky lab supplies and create mashed-up characters.

  Beardy is the gatekeeper of the closet and seems to be in control of who gets in and out. He doesn’t talk, but on more than one occasion, he has rolled his eyes or made faces at me. He used to make me uncomfortable because he always seemed to be staring at me.

  He doesn’t make me nervous anymore. Now that I’ve learned where Beardy came from and how important he is, I feel privileged to have such an important doorknob.

  When I first began writing down and drawing my experiences, I didn’t like to read very much. Books used to be something for other people, but not me. Now, five creatures later, I catch myself reading just for the fun of it.

  My closet has made me above average in the odd department. Only me and my five friends know what my closet can do with books. I’ve thought about telling Janae, but it seems like something I should wait to share when our relationship is stronger.

  So my closet is a secret few people know about, and I’m okay with that. I like what it’s done so far, and I’m beside myself with excitement knowing that in three days the door will unlock and I will find out who’s next.

  CHAPTER 2

  MOURNING

  I am not a morning person—I’m an afternoon human. Early risers like to wake up and pretend as if the sunrise is some amazing movie that they get to watch.

  There’s something suspicious about people who enjoy getting out of bed early. My first-period teacher, Ms. Welt, is suspicious. She loves mornings, and she takes every chance she gets to tell us that.

  She’s way different than my second-period teacher, Mr. Dunnell.

  My dad likes mornings. He used to wake us up really early just so we could fill our lungs with what he called …

  My mom doesn’t like mornings. In fact, she doesn’t really enjoy waking up before noon. A perfect day for her is one spent on the couch sleeping. I used to want her to get up more, but now that I’m older, I kind of like when she’s napping. I never have to ask for permission to go out, and I never get assigned to do extra jobs. All I have to do is just stand there and whisper what I want. Then when she wakes up and questions what I’ve done, I just tell her that I already asked her permission.

  One of the biggest reasons why I don’t like mornings is because I like sleep. Sadly, however, my days of sleeping in are over. It hurts my heart just to say that, but my dad is determined to destroy my slumber. It started two weeks ago when he came home holding a present and wearing a scary grin.

  When I opened the box there was nothing inside. I tipped it over and looked at the bottom—no clues or hints, just an empty box. I figured my dad was just giving me some air because he loved things like air and breathing. But what he actually was giving me was horrible.

  My dad had gone behind my back and signed me up for an early-morning paper route. He actually thought it sounded fun for him to drive the car around while I threw papers. So now every morning for the last two weeks, I’ve had to get up and deliver newspapers with my dad. He is much too happy to begin with, and he is even worse in the mornings.

  The first morning we did it was awful. It was cold and dark, and he kept reading me fun facts from the newspapers as I folded them. He wou
ld also tell me stories about how his dad used to give him their old newspapers to make hats with when he was a kid. I guess that was something people did for fun before smartphones were invented. Personally, I couldn’t believe people still subscribed to newspapers.

  Every morning, we got up at five and folded two hundred newspapers. We slipped coupons and ads into the middle and put a rubber band around the whole thing. I probably would have felt a little better if our city’s paper actually had something good in it. But it was not a good paper.

  After we folded and prepped the papers, my dad would drive us around and I’d toss them out the window while he said encouraging things.

  Another problem with the paper route was that my dad thought it was a good time to ask a lot of painful questions.

  But the worst thing about having a paper route and getting up early was Mrs. Penny Gwinn. I know it’s not nice to say that, but even more awful than having to get up at five or fold a bunch of papers or having my dad tell me uncomfortable things was having to deliver newspapers to her. You know how some people are nice and some people are mean? Well, Mrs. Gwinn is the meanest. She’s ornery, loud, and, well, let’s just say she’s worse than a butt load of splinters from a dry wooden bench.

  She is also the tenth house up the street and on our paper route.

  CHAPTER 3

  SOGGY NEWS

  Mrs. Penny Gwinn is horrible. I like old people, but she is old plus a bunch of other nasty things. She always has curlers in her gray hair. Her one talent seems to be complaining about everything, everyone, and every kid.

  All she does is sit on her front porch under her shade umbrella and throw rocks at kids who are crazy enough to cut across her lawn. Jack has been pelted by her dozens of times.

  Her voice sounds like glass cracking into a microphone, and she has deep-set eyes that give me the willies. She always wears a green housecoat that looks like a tent. She would be the perfect villain in any horror movie or comic.

  After we deliver her paper, she calls my mom and complains about the paper not being folded properly, or about it being thrown in the wrong spot, or that the news in the paper is too depressing.

  She’s bad enough on a normal day, but this morning I accidentally threw her paper into her birdbath.

  When she found her paper soaking in water, she stormed directly to my house and demanded that I make things right. But when I offered to give her another newspaper, she said that wasn’t enough. When my dad offered to pay her for the ruined newspaper, she said that wasn’t enough either. And when my mom asked her what we could do to make things right, she said,

  My parents and I just stared at her until my dad said he needed to go and ran off toward the kitchen. I kept staring. I had no idea what her boxes had to do with anything. So what if Mrs. Gwinn had some things to move? She seemed strong enough to lift an elephant. Certainly she could handle a few boxes.

  I started to laugh and then stopped when I realized that she wasn’t joking. I thought my mom might laugh too, or tell her to just leave. But my mom said something far worse.

  I didn’t know parents were allowed to make their children move things for other people. I knew they could make me unload our dishwasher or clean our cars, but were my parents allowed to hire me out to scary-looking women who smell a little like stinky cheese? Mrs. Gwinn threw out some instructions.

  I love my parents, but they have no idea what fair is. My mom promised Mrs. Gwinn that I’d be over after school to help move her boxes. Mrs. Gwinn looked at me with her angry eyes, sniffed at me with her tiny nose, and then turned and marched off. I shivered. There was no way I was going into her house. As soon as she was gone, I began my argument.

  My mom wouldn’t back down. She thought it would be good for me to help out an old woman. I wanted to point out to my mother that it wasn’t even my fault—my dad had told me to throw the paper, and my dad had made me have the paper route in the first place. I wanted to state my case, but at that moment, the school bus pulled up in front of our house and I had to run and catch it. I was not happy about what was happening, but I knew that if I missed the bus, it wouldn’t help anything. When I got to school, I was in a foul mood. In fact, all day long I stewed over the Mrs. Gwinn situation.

  Right before lunch, I ran into Principal Smelt in the hallway. I usually tried to avoid him, but my mind was preoccupied and I didn’t see him until it was too late.

  I had not met Mr. Kerr, but I knew exactly who he was. That’s because EVERYONE at my school knew who he was. He had a really bushy goatee and a bad wig that didn’t sit right on his head. For the last couple of weeks, all Principal Smelt could talk about was Mr. Kerr and how he was going to remodel our school library because apparently we needed an upgrade. According to Principal Smelt, Mr. Kerr was going to give us …

  Our school had won a contest that Mr. Kerr’s company was running, and now we were getting a library overhaul. According to Principal Smelt, we were soon going to have the kind of media center that would …

  Mr. Kerr had been hanging around our school for a while, getting things ready. He had even moved his camper into the middle of our school parking lot so that he could easily work and sleep and be close to the school.

  His camper was small, but he claimed it had everything he needed.

  I didn’t really care about keys, or Mr. Kerr, or campers. In fact, I was kind of bothered by the guy. He had shifty eyes and laughed like a cartoon villain whenever Principal Smelt told a joke. Besides, our library was fine as it was. A lot of the books I had read recently had come from there. Now an outsider had come in to make things “better.”

  Principal Smelt told a joke, and Mr. Kerr laughed. I couldn’t stand the sound, so I excused myself from the conversation and left.

  Also, it was lunchtime and I was hungry.

  I ate my food sitting on the wall outside of the cafeteria with my friends. Janae walked by right after I took a big bite of my sandwich.

  When she walked off, my friends began to make fun of me like they sometimes did. Actually, they made fun of me like they usually did. To be honest, they made fun of me like it was their destiny.

  Trevor was my only friend who didn’t give me grief. Maybe it was because he was too dorky to know how to make fun of me, or maybe it was because he really was a good guy. I think it’s probably because he’s dorky. Oddly enough, I think Trevor would probably agree with me.

  Trevor reminded me that I had something very important to ask my friends. So I swallowed my food and spoke.

  CHAPTER 4

  NOT SO PLEASANT

  I have been taught my whole life not to be selfish, so I decided to invite my friends to help me move boxes at Mrs. Gwinn’s after school. I knew that if I could get one of them to come with me, it would go faster and be way less boring. They all wanted to know what I would pay them to help. Well, everyone besides Trevor.

  Trevor is a Pleasant Scout. He is a member of troop number Friendly Wave. I know Friendly Wave isn’t actually a number, but not much about the Pleasant Scouts makes sense. They meet once a month and work on doing things that Trevor always says are …

  One month, they lowered the slides at the park so that they weren’t so steep. Another time, they went on a trip to a hotel where they gave the maids a rest and cleaned their own hotel rooms. The leader of the Pleasant Scouts is a man named Rick. He has a bald head and always wears the official Pleasant Scout neckwear and vest.

  The motto of the Pleasant Scouts is It doesn’t take a hero to wave. They even have a pledge, which Trevor has told me on a number of occasions. Just last week when I was thinking of keeping a pencil I found in the school parking lot, he recited it for me again. It was sort of painful to hear, and the worst part was that he always marched in place when he recited it.

  At the moment, I was fine with Trevor being a Pleasant Scout. I was more than happy to help him earn another Pleasant Pin if it meant he would be helping me move boxes. Jack also wanted to come. He had heard there was a dead body
in Mrs. Gwinn’s basement, and he wanted to check it out for himself.

  I was okay with that too. I figured either we would get all the boxes moved quickly or we would bug Mrs. Gwinn so much that she would insist that we leave and never come back. My other three friends didn’t want to help. Actually, Rourk wanted to come and …

  But even when Rourk was helping, he was horrible. So I told him that there was a two-friend limit.

  After school Trevor, Jack, and I all walked up the street to Mrs. Gwinn’s house. I was feeling a little better knowing that I would have some friends to help me. Sadly, Mrs. Gwinn didn’t feel the same.

  Mrs. Gwinn picked up Jack by the back of his shirt and pushed him away from her house. Trevor figured a hug might make her feel differently about letting him stay, but when he moved in, she thought he was attacking her, so she swatted him with a long, lacy pillow she had on her porch. I guess the swatting changed Trevor’s mind.