Middle School: How I Got Lost in London Read online

  In other words, the gory stuff.

  Yeah, yeah, we saw the celebrities. But honestly? Do you really want to stand eyeball to eyeball with Tom Cruise?

  You do?!

  Not me. I wanted stuff from out of my world. So I found myself hanging around longest at Henry VIII (he married six times and beheaded two of his wives!), Winston Churchill (he said “We shall never surrender” to Adolf Hitler!), Charles Darwin (it’s thanks to him we know monkeys are our ancestors!), Guy Fawkes (he tried to blow up Parliament…Wait: Are we supposed to like him or not?).

  Our tour guide was a guy called Gordon. Either he didn’t know that everyone was goofing off behind him or he didn’t care. Or maybe he had an ace up his sleeve. Maybe he knew the smirking would stop as soon as we went down into the basement. When we got to the Temple of Terrors.

  I WAS KIND of sad to leave the upper floors. And also kind of…

  “Scared…?” whispered Leo.

  “No, of course I’m not scared,” I said.

  “Frightened?”

  “Frightened is the same as scared,” I told him. “And no, I’m not frightened.”

  “Browning your britches?” he asked.

  “You’re just using different words to say the same thing. No, I am not browning my britches.”

  I’ll let you into a secret: I was kind of nervous.

  Woah! I don’t mean the whole hog. Not like when Georgia freaked out at a not-that-scary episode of Scooby Doo. Just a bit crawling-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach nervous. You know the kind. Like you get when you don’t know what to expect. When your imagination has taken the words guillotine, beheading, gallows, and serial killer and started to run with them.

  “Is everyone ready?” asked Gordon, the tour guide. Before, he’d been a bit glass-eyed, like a robot delivering a pre-recorded speech. Now there was no mistaking the glint in his gaze.

  “Yeah,” we all replied, pretending like we weren’t impressed.

  Mindful of my Popularity Score (currently: -11), I’d decided I was going to be fearless when it came to the Temple of Terrors, so my “Yeah” was the loudest.

  “YEAH!”

  “Right, then, let’s go,” said Gordon. He went to open the door but stopped, looking like he’d just remembered something important.

  “There’s nobody in the group who suffers from a weak heart?” he asked.

  “No,” we replied.

  “NO!” came my voice, the loudest.

  “And everyone knows about the haunting?”

  “YEAH!” I shouted, enjoying myself. Really getting into the part.

  Oh. I realized I was the only one who’d replied.

  Everyone looked at me. Including Gordon, who arched an eyebrow.

  “What is your name, young man?” he asked.

  “Rafe,” I said with a pipsqueak voice.

  “And you know about the haunting, do you, Rafe?”

  I swallowed. “Yes,” I said in an even smaller voice.

  “You read about it on the Madame Fifi’s website, did you?” he asked, with a strange smile.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  The whole trip was staring at me. Everyone had been dying to hear about the haunting. They weren’t sitting down, but if they had been sitting down they would have been on the edge of their seats waiting for the scary story of the Temple of Terrors haunting…

  Only for the whole thing to be spoiled by me.

  “Excellent,” said Gordon. He clapped his hands. “Then without further ado, let us proceed.”

  He opened the door to reveal winding stone steps that led down into darkness. Everyone else glared at me. All except for Miller, that was. He just glowered as usual.

  My Popularity Score took another dip.

  Current Popularity Score: -22

  Down we went. Down into the depths of Madame Fifi’s. It was so much darker than it had been on the upper floors.

  At the bottom we heard a rumbling sound. One of the girls gasped but Gordon assured her it was just a passing London Underground train.

  (Okay, I admit—it wasn’t “one of the girls” who gasped, it was me. Like I say, it was dark, and when I gasp I sound like a girl anyway.)

  Wax figures seemed to loom at us from the gloom.

  “Cool,” we said as we peered at heads on spikes, victims on racks, murderers caught in the act. Really gross, scary stuff. And not just really gross, scary stuff, but really gross, scary stuff that had actually happened.

  All I’ll say about a guy called Vlad the Impaler is that the clue is in the name. And as for Countess Bathory—guess what she figured would be good for her skin? That’s right: blood. She actually kidnapped girls and…took a bath…in their…

  Too much information?

  Sure. Too much information.

  “Cool,” we said. And yes, I know it doesn’t sound like we were taking the whole real-people-dying-gruesome-deaths thing all that seriously, but listen: They died their gruesome deaths a really long time ago. Which makes all the difference. Which means you can say “Cool” without feeling too guilty about it.

  “Now, Rafe…” said Gordon. We stopped near a scene of a woman being put to death by seventeenth-century witchfinders.

  “Here,” I said, out of habit.

  “Since you know all about the ghost of Madame Fifi’s, I expect you can tell us all about the famous Temple of Terrors wager?”

  NO WAY was I going to spoil this one for the rest of class. I shook my head “no” furiously.

  Gordon smiled. “Well, I’ll tell you then, shall I?”

  OVER A HUNDRED years ago, two rather well-dressed Victorian gentlemen are taking a tour around the famous Madame Fifi’s House of Wax. With them is a lady in whom they both have a romantic interest.

  “I say,” says one, twirling his mustache, “have you been down to this Temple of Terrors they’ve been writing about in the Pall Mall Gazette? They do say it’s frightfully frightful.”

  “Frightfully frightful indeed,” says the second gent, as he adjusts his waistcoat on his ample stomach.

  Eleanor (the lady) clutches her pearls. “Oh, Cedric, it sounds perfectly dreadful.”

  Sensing their chance to impress their lady friend, both men preen.

  “A lot of sensationalist rot, no doubt,” says William. “The ravings of a journalist with an overactive imagination.”

  “You don’t sound terribly convinced, William,” says Eleanor.

  “Oh, indeed not, Eleanor, indeed not.”

  “Well, William,” says Cedric, “what say you we descend the steps to discover for ourselves just how frightening this place is?”

  “What a wheeze it will be.”

  And the two gents take the stone steps down into the Temple of Terrors.

  “Well, I say!” says William. He peers around into the gloom, seeing the grotesque, waxy figures staring sightlessly back at him. His skin crawls with fear. “It’s not at all frightening, what?”

  “No, not at all frightening,” says Cedric, swallowing hard and finding he has a sudden need to use the bathroom.

  “Why, I would quite happily spend the night here,” says William. Who would quite happily do anything but spend the night there.

  “And I would quite happily join you,” agrees Cedric. Who would rather eat a bowl of rancid horse manure than spend the night in the Temple of Terrors.

  “Then how about a friendly wager?” suggests William. Who happens to know his friend has little spare money, and will be unlikely to take him up on the bet.

  “What a splendid idea,” says Cedric, who unbeknownst to William has recently inherited a goodly sum from a favorite aunt.

  And so, because both men are more frightened of losing face than they are of the Temple of Terrors, and because both men are so terribly determined to impress the fair Eleanor, they both agree to spend the night…

  “NEITHER MAN WAS able to stay the whole night,” continued Gordon, as he told the tale. “They ran screaming, wide-eyed with terror, froth
ing with fear, gibbering about ghosts and horrors. And the very next day, both men were found at their homes…”

  Gordon fixed us with a stare. You could have heard a pin drop.

  “…dead…”

  As one, we gasped.

  “Both having taken their own lives.”

  He mimed a noose and stuck out his tongue. “Rerk!”

  We gasped again. The wax figures now seemed to crowd in on us. The low light reflected from the pale, gleaming skin of executioners and their victims. The unseeing eyes of murderers seemed to stare at us.

  “And so William’s Wager remains uncollected,” Gordon said, “until the day someone brave enough to dare spend the night in the Temple of Terrors should accept the challenge…”

  And with that, he moved on, wearing an air of quiet triumph. We followed meekly behind him, lost for wisecracks.

  I felt an elbow in my ribs.

  “I bet you’re too chicken to take up the wager,” whisper-sneered Miller, loud enough for Jeanne to hear.

  “I’m not scared of a few wax models,” I whisper-sneered right back.

  “Bet y’are…”

  “Bet I’m not,” I said.

  “Bet you’re too chicken to accept William’s Wager,” Miller said again.

  “Bet I’m not.”

  Over a century since William and Cedric had pretended they weren’t scared, me and Miller were doing the same. But William and Cedric were guys in the past, right? People were dumb then. They didn’t have TiVO or CGI or YouTube. It would be different with me and Miller, right?

  Wrong.

  Before I knew it, Miller and I were daring each other back and forth. And word had spread through the group. I sensed a chance—my big chance—to improve my Popularity Score and impress Jeanne and get one over on Miller—all at the same time.

  I could win.

  For once, I could win.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I accept the wager. Just as long as you do too.”

  “It’s a deal,” Miller said with a grin on his face.

  He hadn’t batted an eyelid. Wasn’t fazed at all. Just accepted the bet. Which meant he was thinking exactly what I was thinking. And what I was thinking was this:

  No way were we really going to spend the night in the Temple of Terrors. As soon as the teachers had a roll-call and discovered us missing they’d return to Madame Fifi’s and fetch us. Oh, sure, we were going to be in a truckload of trouble with Donatello and Dwight. But look at the positives: the increased Popularity Score, the admiration of Jeanne…The fact that I would get all this without actually having to spend the night in the Temple of Terrors. It was the best idea I’d had all trip.

  Wasn’t it?

  OURS WAS THE last tour of the day, so Miller and I agreed to hang back and hide when the group returned upstairs. They’d do a roll-call on the coach, so by my estimation we had about ten minutes of hiding before we were hauled out of there.

  A scary ten minutes.

  A tense ten minutes.

  But just ten minutes.

  I ducked behind a scene from the French Revolution, coming face to face with a severed head in a basket.

  The door to the exhibit closed. I heard a key turn in the lock.

  And I waited.

  A silence settled over the room. A sudden rumbling startled me. But then I remembered it was a Tube train passing nearby. Silence fell again. An eerie, scary silence.

  I imagined the wax figures coming alive then stopped myself. How about if I imagined them dancing together instead? No, because that would still mean them coming alive. How about I just gave my imagination a rest?

  I did that instead.

  Then, after a while, I whispered, “Hey, Miller? You scared yet?”

  There was no reply. I tittered to myself. Browning his britches, I bet.

  “Hey…Miller?”

  The deal was he’d hide behind a Spanish Inquisition exhibit. I stepped out from behind the French Revolution, took a deep breath, and went over to it.

  “Hey, Miller…” I said. I peered behind a man being stretched on a rack.

  He wasn’t there.

  Straightaway I realized what had happened. How could I have been so dumb? He’d double-crossed me. He’d promised to hide but joined the group and left.

  My imagination woke up. I pictured the group boarding the coach outside Madame Fifi’s. I pictured Dwight taking roll-call and Miller saying “Here” at my turn and everyone snickering. And then I pictured the coach leaving. Without me. Miller back at the hotel, failing to alert anybody to the fact that his roomie hadn’t turned up…

  I dashed to the door. But it was locked. I began banging on it. A thick, wooden door like the door to a dungeon.

  “HERE!” I shouted.

  (A great “Here” it was too. A really meaty “Here.”)

  But nobody came. I was locked in. I was locked in for the night.

  “THIS IS ALL your fault,” I told Leo as I looked nervously around at the exhibits. It wasn’t really Leo’s fault. It was my fault. Even so.

  My gaze travelled past a man in a mask who held an axe. I looked away then quickly back again to see if he’d moved.

  Of course he hadn’t moved. None of the waxworks were going to move. They weren’t going to move. They weren’t going to come alive. And they weren’t even going to start dancing. You know why? Because they were waxworks! There are only two places waxworks come alive.

  One, in movies I’m not old enough to watch yet.

  And two, in my imagination.

  That’s what I told myself. Even as I wandered around looking for another door, feeling like I really needed the bathroom, talking to Leo the Silent as I did so. I told myself, “They’re only waxworks—they don’t come alive.”

  Okay, it was time to bring in the big guns. I reached for my phone, ready to dial 911.

  (Which would have been the wrong number for emergency services, remember? Told you it would become important.)

  But anyway, I had no bars on my phone.

  Okay, I thought, don’t panic. A place like Madame Fifi’s was going to have security. A night watchman. And pretty soon that night watchman was going to discover me. Which meant that pretty soon I’d be back with the group. Truckload of trouble etc., but still—a decent mark on the Popularity Score. No face lost.

  I listened out for the sound of a security guard. What would a security guard sound like? Shiny black boots on the stone floor. The rattle of keys on a long chain. And whistling—because people in England whistle a lot. They drink tea, eat Marmite, and whistle. It’s how they roll.

  In the end, I didn’t hear him approach at all. Which was probably quite lucky, since I would have jumped out of my skin. Instead what I heard was, “And what might you be doing here?”

  Oh, I did—jump out of my skin, I mean. And when I’d returned to my skin I found myself face to face with a very old but kindly looking security guard.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me with a smile.

  I relaxed and told him.

  “You’re American, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Rafe,” he said. “My name is Albert.”

  I certainly appreciated his effort to make me feel at ease. He ushered me to the rear of the exhibit, to a door that I hadn’t seen when I’d been looking around.

  Inside was the night watchman’s office. It was a really simple set-up. A desk with what looked like an old newspaper on it. A fire with a pot of water bubbling on it. No kettle for this guy. He was heating his water the American way. Over a stove. Well…a fire.

  I took a seat. I was thinking that maybe Albert would pick up the phone to call the Mercury Lodge Hotel. But there was no phone in the office. Matter of fact, Albert didn’t have a TV, either. Or even a radio. No wonder he wasn’t angry with me: He must have been glad of the company.

  “You haven’t introduced me to your friend,” said Albert.

  “Oh,” I said. “This is
Leo the Silent.”

  “It’s splendid to make your acquaintance, Leo,” said Albert.

  “Uh…sure…” laughed Leo in reply.

  Albert turned to me. “And why, might I ask, are the two of you alone in the Temple of Terrors after hours?”

  I took a deep breath and told him.

  I guess I did what they call “over-sharing,” because I told him pretty much the whole story. Beginning with my lame “Here” at first assembly and ending in the Temple of Terrors.

  And I know it’s kind of a cliché but it felt good to talk. It felt like I got a lot of stuff off my chest.

  “Well, you had better rejoin your group,” said Albert. He stood up. He had a weird way of doing things without making much noise. Or even, really, any noise. Then he said, “But how would you like your own guided tour of Madame Fifi’s first?”

  “The whole thing?” I asked. “Not just the Temple of Terrors?”

  “The whole thing,” said Albert with a smile. “And when it’s over, I have a gift for you. Something that might just help you with your bully problem…”

  MADAME FIFI’S ALLOWS photography, but that’s the problem—everyone, like everyone, is taking photographs. I’d found that out earlier when I’d been trying to get a picture for my Living History trip report and ended up with some fascinating shots of the backs of people’s heads.

  It’s not a problem when you have the place to yourself, though. And even easier when you have your own tour guide in the shape of our new friend Albert. He took Leo and me around the whole place. He and Leo were getting on like a house on fire. Leo asked questions while I snapped away with my camera and scrawled notes and sketches wherever I could. How cool was the tour? Put it this way. Before the tour I had nothing for my report. After it, I had enough for two.