Measle and the Wrathmonk

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Chapter One

The Horrible House

Measle Stubbs was ten and a half years old. He was small, thin and bony. He had a short snub nose, a pair of eyes colored a deep emerald green and (when he felt like it) a wide and friendly smile. His hair was brown and stood up all over his head in spiky tufts. It was the oddest haircut -- long where it should have been short, short where it should have been long -- and the reason it was like this was because Measle cut his hair himself, using a blunt and rusty kitchen knife, with which he sawed and hacked at his hair whenever it got so long that it fell in his eyes. Apart from having the most uneven haircut imaginable, his hair also hadn't been washed in a very long time. Neither had his clothes, and sometimes he smelled pretty bad, particularly when the weather was warm. It wasn't warm very often where Measle Stubbs lived, because he lived in a cold and horrible house.

The horrible house was at the far end of a dreary, dirty street full of dreary, dirty houses, but three things set it apart from all the others. The first was the way it looked -- all black, with a tall, pointed roof, tall, dark, narrow windows like blind eyes and tall, soot-caked chimneys that were like dirty fingers pointing at the sky. It looked like something bad had happened in it -- and, quite possibly, something bad could happen in it again tomorrow.

The second thing was that it was the only house that was occupied. All the other houses had been deserted by their owners long ago and their doors and windows boarded over.

The third thing was also the strangest: all day and all night, winter, summer, autumn and spring, there was a small, black cloud that hung, never moving, over the dismal roof, dribbling a steady, constant stream of rain that fell only on the house where Measle Stubbs lived and not at all on any of the others in the street.

The house belonged to Basil Tramplebone, and Basil Tramplebone was Measle Stubbs's legal guardian. Measle lived in the house with just his legal guardian for company, and his legal guardian wasn't good company at all. He was very tall and thin and he always wore black clothes. A black coat and a black shirt and a black tie; black trousers and black socks and black shoes. His greasy hair was black, and he parted it in the middle and plastered it down on his head with black shoe polish. The only things that weren't black about him were his face and his hands: Basil's face was very white, as though all the blood had been drained out and replaced with milk. His eyes were like fish eyes -- staring and blank and very, very cold. His long, bony hands were the color of candles, and the skin was so dry that it rustled when he rubbed his palms together, which he did when he was pleased. Basil Tramplebone wasn't pleased very often, so the rustling noise didn't happen very often.

If the outside of Basil Tramplebone's house was grim and gloomy and depressingly ugly, the inside was even worse. All the rooms in the house smelled bad -- each one in a different way -- and most of them frightened Measle half to death. He certainly didn't dare go into the room that was supposed to be his bedroom. There was a huge black oak wardrobe in there, full of clothes that weren't his. They felt damp and smelled of mildew. Once Measle had gotten up enough courage to sort through the clothes. He stopped when he found the jacket. It was made of some sort of rough material and it had three sleeves -- two in the usual places and a third that stuck out at the back. When he finally got up the courage to ask Basil about it, Basil told him to mind his own business -- but if he must know, all the clothes in the wardrobe had been left there over the years by visiting friends of his, some of whom were, perhaps, a little different.

The wardrobe was in one dark corner of the bedroom, and a great, black bed that looked like a coffin was in the other. There were black velvet curtains over the windows and the glass in the windows was painted black, so you couldn't see out at all. What with the black painted walls and ceiling and floorboards, it was one of the gloomiest rooms you can imagine, and one that would certainly give you nightmares if you tried to sleep in it -- so Measle didn't try at all. Instead, he slept on a pile of old rags in the kitchen, right up by the ancient iron stove, which was the only place in that horrible house that was at all warm.

Measle hated Basil Tramplebone and, of course, Basil Tramplebone hated Measle, because Basil hated everybody. He only looked after Measle because Measle's mother and father had been killed by an encounter with a deadly snake when Measle was four years old, leaving poor little Measle an orphan.The story about the deadly snake had come from Basil who, in Measle's experience, always told the truth. His parents had left a lot of money in the bank and now it was all Measle's, but a judge had said that Measle was too young to have control of all that money and to live by himself and had appointed Basil -- who said he was Measle Stubbs's fourth cousin twelve times removed and, therefore, Measle's closest living relative -- to look after him and his money. The odd thing was that the judge had looked a little like Basil. The same black clothes, the same cold, fishy eyes, the same white, white face. He'd even talked a bit like Basil, too -- and every time he'd looked at Basil, he'd smiled like a crocodile, as if he was approving of everything that Basil said.

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Excerpted from Measle and the Wrathmonk by Ian Ogilvy
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.