Davey Platt knew he was going to miss his old friends, even if Mom and Dad said he could go visit them, or have them come visit sometimes. They weren’t moving that far. But he’d be in a different school, come Fall, and would have to make new friends there. His sister Amy was only one grade ahead of him, but she’d be in middle school while he was still in elementary.
On the plus side, their new house was totally awesome.
It looked like it was about a hundred years old, and though Dad said it was old-fashioned for the time it was built, it was still pretty old. “We couldn’t have afforded a house this big if it were newer,” Dad said. “And those murals didn’t exactly raise the price either...”
The person who used to own the house until she died was an artist. She’d painted murals in every room. Davey could hardly believe that Dad was planning to paint over the battle scene in the living room and the mural in his and Mom’s bedroom, which he hadn’t let any of the kids see. Davey’s big brother Carson had snuck in to see it, and he wouldn’t tell Davey or Amy what it was; he just snickered when they asked him about it. But Dad said the kids could decide whether to keep the ones in their rooms. Davey was totally keeping his.
Standing inside his room the day they decided to buy the house, with no furniture in the room, it was like you were in the courtyard of one of those houses in Italy that had their yards on the inside. There was a sun in the sky above the window, and the roof of the house below that, and small trees all around, and a bench with a vine-covered trellis over it. And just to the right of the door to the hall, leading to Carson and Amy’s bedrooms and the bathroom they’d share, was another door, or rather a gateway, that would lead to the outside of the villa. You could just see a road and a horse and buggy going down it, off in the distance, and hills beyond that, dotted with what Mom said were probably olive trees.
When Dad asked him where he wanted his furniture, he made sure that gateway wasn’t covered up by the bed or dresser or anything.
Davey and Amy were too little to carry anything heavy in from the moving truck, but Mom kept them busy helping her unpack boxes in the kitchen and put plates, bowls, silverware and so forth in the cabinets and drawers. Then they had to unpack towels and put them in the bathroom closet. Then Mom told them to go unpack their own boxes of stuff now that Dad and Carson and Uncle Rob had gotten the furniture in place.
So Davey was pretty wiped out by the time he finally went to bed. They hadn’t had time to look at the yard much, though Davey remembered from the day they’d decided to buy the house that it had several big oak trees, one of them with a treehouse. Dad said they weren’t supposed to climb into it until he’d inspected it and made sure it was still safe. Maybe he’d have time to do that tomorrow, and he and Amy could see what it looked like inside.
He lay there in bed looking at the mural in the dim glow of the nightlight, seeing the trees, the trellis over the bench, and the shadowy gateway.
“You can’t deny that it’s good art,” Carson said, drawing his paint brush across a vast swath of mermaid tail, “but I’ll be glad when it’s gone and we can come and go without being so careful not to let the kids get a glimpse of our bedroom.”
Amanda laughed through her paint mask. They had the windows open and box fans pulling fresh air in and blowing paint fumes out, and they kept taking frequent breaks to go over and stand by the windows and fan, but they were keeping the door to the living room scrupulously closed at all times. Amy and Davey were in there playing video games; they could hear the sound effects even over the noise of the fans.
There wasn’t much more to do here, and then they could start on the gory battlefield in the living room. They’d wanted to paint these rooms before they moved in, but the timing hadn’t worked out, with the people buying their old house needing to move in by a certain date and willing to pay extra to make sure it happened. They’d already painted over most of the erotic scenes covering the walls, some of them depicting episodes from classical mythology that Carson vaguely recognized, others unfamiliar. What was left on the east wall was just a young couple, human and mermaid, sporting in a tide pool on a beach with more rocks than sand.
“They look chilly,” Amanda remarked. “I don’t know why, but I get the feeling they’re on a beach fairly far north, and the reason they’re in the tide pool is that the ocean water is too cold for the man.”
“I think it’s... yeah, you can see goosebumps on the man’s skin if you look close,” Carson said. “Not the mermaid’s, though.”
“Of course not, they’d probably be adapted to a wide range of temperatures.”
Carson hoped the photos he’d taken before they started painting would show that level of detail. The artist who’d owned the house before had put an enormous amount of thought and work into this, and in a way it seemed a shame to destroy it. But spending the next eight years until Davey left for college slipping quickly in and out of their bedroom without letting the kids get a glimpse of it, constantly tempting them with the forbidden... it just wouldn’t do. What if one of the kids needed to wake them in the middle of the night for an emergency?
No, he thought regretfully as he painted over some reefs on the horizon, it was better this way.
It was over a week before Dad found time to inspect the treehouse. First he wanted to paint his and Mom’s bedroom, then the living room, and that involved moving a lot of furniture around, which had to wait for times when Uncle Rob or somebody could come over and help. Davey and Amy explored the yard and the attic, which had some stuff left over from the previous owner — some dried-out paints, a broken easel, and some half-finished paintings, nothing as good as the murals downstairs. They walked around the neighborhood and met some other kids who lived nearby. Unfortunately, none of them were particularly close to Davey or Amy’s age; there were a couple of girls close to Carson’s age, and a boy and girl who were at least two years younger than Davey, and a family with twin babies. The younger kids didn’t have much to say about the Platts' new house, which had been empty as long as they could remember. The older girls remembered the lady who used to live there, back when they were kids. “She had the best Halloween and Christmas decorations, and the best candy,” said Tanya, the younger of the two high-schoolers. “And she’d have us over for tea, and let us look at her paintings. But she disappeared, back when I was around seven or eight, I think. Her family couldn’t sell the house until she’d been gone for seven years and the state declared her dead, is what I heard.”
After Dad inspected the treehouse, then tore out some rotten boards and replaced them, Davey and Amy celebrated by having their lunch in the treehouse. (Carson thought he was too old and cool for that.)
“This is an awesome place to live,” Amy said, taking another bite of her ham sandwich.
“Yeah,” Davey replied. “I wish it was in our old school district, though.”
“We’ve still got each other.”
they could have just used wallpaper so not as to destroy the art lol, and why is the big brother sharing a room with the sister? 99% of the time the girls and boys are split, even when they are family, since boys and girls need to get changed and they do need privacy from each other
They aren't sharing rooms. Each of the kids have their own bedrooms. All three share a bathroom, but the house doesn't have enough bathrooms for all of the kids and the parents to have their own. I'm not sure what made you think that Carson Jr. and Amy are sharing a bedroom?
@TrismegistusShandy ignore me, i read this late at night and i have vision problems, i read it as "bedroom" rather than "bedrooms"
I hope this clearly magical painting can resist modern paints. Thank you for the story.
Why didn't they do what those ancient guys did with nude art and put fig leaves over the indecent bits and just left the rest of it?
- this is published?! Cool!
the title gives me lion, witch, wardrobe vibes
The titular allusion to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is deliberate.