The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn

walls. They were scrawled everywhere—even on the handrails going upstairs. But as I studied them, I noticed a surprising neatness. The diagrams were carefully drawn. The circles were perfectly round. The equations were tidily stacked. The scribbles didn’t look as crazy as I’d originally thought. Maybe they made sense after all.
    I decided to find out if I was right. I scoured the house for a diagram simple enough for me to understand. I found an equation that read like this:

    I had no idea what that meant but next to the equation was this:

    That made no sense to me either. Below that, though, was an unexpectedly simple diagram. It featured a wooden spool, three heavy washers, a very sharp pencil, and a couple of rubber bands. I tried to create the device with stuff I found in our kitchen junk drawer. After three tries and forty-five minutes, I ended up with something that looked like a spinning top, so I twisted some string around the wooden spool and gave it a tug.
    The top spun on the kitchen floor, tilt and all, for about ten minutes before it clattered onto its side and fell apart.
    That simple little top made me smile. Something in this house, insignificant as it was, had actually worked the way I’d hoped it would. I looked around the house for another diagram I could decipher, but all of them baffled me.
    “I’m bored again,” I said.
    “Why don’t you go read something?” Mom was sorting through a box of photographs in the living room.
    “I’m not in the mood.”
    “Enough already, Josh. Go play a game.”
    “Played them all.”
    “Then make yourself lunch. I’ve got some sliced provolone in the fridge. You could get a straw and poke little holes in it.”
    “I’m not hungry. And Aaron’s the one who pokes holes in cheese. Not me.”
    “You’re driving me crazy, Josh. There’s got to be something in this house you can do.”
    I thought for a moment. “Can I go up to the attic?”
    “Absolutely not. You’ll get bitten by a rat.”
    “All the rats moved next door,” I said. “Besides, I don’t think Mr. Daga would ever bite me.”
    “Well, you’ll get bitten by something.”
    “No, I won’t. And Dad said there’s still all sorts of weird old junk up there. Why can’t I look through it?”
    “Because I said so. You’d probably fall through the ceiling. Go do something else.”
    I shuffled up to my room and sat on the floor. I stared at the scribbles I hadn’t managed to cover over with posters. I was studying a diagram of a holly berry next to the words
ilex aquifolium
when I heard the back door slam. That meant Mom had gone outside to work in the garden. An impulse I couldn’t resist grabbed hold of me. I ran up the stairs to the All-the-Way-Up Room.
    I opened the hidden door, clicked the switch, and watched a lone bulb blush to life somewhere back in the gloom.
    The ceiling slanted low, forcing me to crouch. Stacks of boxes tilted everywhere, and shadowy shapes filled the corners. The attic space faded to blackness, far beyond the dim glow of the lightbulb.
    I rushed back to my room and dug through my drawers until I found a headlamp I used for camping. I stood motionless and listened for a minute, but the house was quiet. Mom was still outside.
    Using the headlamp to light the way, I crawled through the little door into the attic. In the boxes just inside the door I found:
An old cloth flour bag full of pennies dated 1929. They all looked brand new, and there must have been a thousand of them.
An envelope with old first, second, and third place ribbons for shot-putting at a New York high school track invitational.
Boxes and boxes of books. Only two looked interesting—an old red book with an ornate cover decorated with gold holly leaves, and one called
Handbook of United States Coins
. Both were well chewed by rats.
Coin albums completely devoid of coins. The rats had chewed these as well.
A rusty three-inch pocketknife. I put this in my pocket.
Seven wigs. They all fit