Journey
to Welcome
by Jo Christian Babich
©1995
ISBN# 0-9647171-0-7
$9.95
for ages 11 and up
About the Author: Jo Christian Babich grew up in Austin, Texas, with deep roots in the near-by hill country. As a child, she listened to her grandmother tell of "the long ago" over the breakfast table at sunrise, and in this engrossing novel for Young Adults, she has captured something of that spirit.
From Chapter One : The Young Strangers
"Karrie, come on!"
Karrie sat, hugging herself, knees pressed together, on a large flat rock near the gate. She was not crying, but her eyes were stark and hollow.
"Marty, please, let's just go back to New York."
"There's nothing to go back to," said Marty. "Come on, get up! We went to the trouble of changing our clothes so we'd look halfway respectable — If we don't get a move on we'll be limp and sweaty again by the time we get to the door."
"I'm limp and sweaty again already."
"Well, Ole Ben Tucker — or whoever he is — wanted to drive right up to the house. Why did you make him put us out here?"
"Did you want to ring the bell and be standing there with a bunch of suitcases — looking pitiful? This way, if they seem mean, we can pretend we stopped by out of curiosity."
"Oh, sure! We happened to be strolling along out here in the middle of nowhere and thought we'd pop in to say 'Hi!' Come on, squirt! Remember what Dad told you the first time you had to take the subway alone? Don't ever show you're afraid. Walk as if you own the city!"
"There's no city to own. There's not even a town. Did you see a town, Marty? Just the train station and some broken-down old farms. And now this — The House of Dracula!"
She allowed him to take her hand and pull her to her feet, and the two of them looked toward the gray clapboard house that waited at the end of the winding gravel driveway. Looming solitary and outsized on the crest of the hill, it seemed a forbidding place. Three stories high, crowned by a widow's walk and a whale-shaped weather vane, it was a house of gables and gingerbread eaves, of long windows and wraparound porches. It had no proper foundation, but rested on piers of rock and cement, and the airspace between the structure and the earth lent the house a precarious, ungrounded appearance, as though it might take off, all of a piece, and fly right off the hill. An ancient live oak tree leaned toward the front of the house, shading the porches on the first and second floors with its twisty branches and dusty foliage, but there was no shrubbery, and no grass. Some hundred yards to the rear stood a barn, and beyond that, a windmill. The property was fenced with barbed wire, and at the entrance to the drive, where Karrie and Marty were standing, a wooden gate hung between two wide gateposts built of stone. On one the words Windy Crest were cut, and on the other, 1846. But it was the house itself that held the attention of the two young people.
"There must be a million rooms in there," said Karrie. "All of them creepy!"
"Never mind the creepy," said Marty firmly. "Let's hope there'll be a couple of rooms in there for us."
He pushed open the wooden gate and, leaving their suitcases concealed behind the gateposts, they started up the drive.
"Hold your shoulders back, Karrie," said the boy. "They could be watching from the window. Walk as if you own — the gravel," he finished lamely.
No one was watching from the window. No one at Windy Crest was expecting company on that lazy afternoon in June. Miss Ginger was sitting at the writing desk in her second-floor bedroom, playing solitaire, while her sister Prune napped in a wicker chaise longue on the adjoining screened-in sleeping porch. The mayor was in his study downstairs, with the door closed. Lulled by the breeze and whir of an electric fan, he dozed in a cane-backed rocking chair, a book lying open across his knees. On the screened porch off the kitchen, Martha and Israel were stretched out on pallets, taking their afternoon rest between the cleaning up after the noonday meal and the preparations for supper. All was quiet, except for the monotonous, rising call of the cicadas, and the occasional moan of the windmill.
Then suddenly, there was the clomp clomp clomp of the heavy doorknocker, causing everyone in the house to sit up with a start. Israel was on his feet in an instant, slipping into his shoes and white cotton jacket, buttoning his collar and smoothing his hair as he hurried toward the front door. By the time his hand was on the knob, Martha was peering out from the kitchen, the mayor was standing in the doorway of the study, and Miss Ginger and Miss Prune were coming down the stairs.
Whatever each may have surmised was on the other side of that door, it is certain that not one of them was near the mark. When it was opened to reveal a short, dark-haired girl and a tall, brown-haired boy, both dressed ridiculously for a June day in Texas, there was a moment of wordless surprise.
Then all the occupants of Windy Crest advanced a step and waited, as if for the other shoe to drop. They didn't have to wait long.
"Good afternoon," said the boy affably. "We're the mayor's grandchildren. May we come in?"