Professor Gargoyle Read Online Free PDF

tomorrow, would you like that?”
    There was a sudden knock at the door.
    “Robert? Can I come in?”
    He grabbed the box and shoved it under the bed.
    “It’s open!” he called.
    His mother entered the room. “Did you just get off the phone?” Robert shook his head. “I thought I heard you talking to someone.”
    “Must have been the radio.”
    It was clear Mrs. Arthur didn’t believe him. She sat beside him on the bed and wrapped her arm around his waist.
    “Is everything all right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You like the new school?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Are you having any problems?”
    “Yeah. I mean, no.”
    His mother looked down at him. “I’m trying to have a conversation, Robert. Do you understand? This doesn’t work unless you’re actively listening and sharing information.”
    “I’m sorry,” Robert said.
    And he truly was sorry. His mother already had enough problems, between working full shifts at the hospital and cooking and cleaning and doing all the laundry. She never had any time leftover for going out and doing anything fun. The least he could do was cheer her up a little.
    “Lovecraft is fantastic,” he told her. “We went to the library today? For the first time? And you wouldn’t believe it, Mom. It’s so big, I actually got lost.”
    She smiled. “Seriously?”
    “Yeah, and my English teacher? Mr. Loomis? He’s this really nice guy. He showed me where to check out books. Oh, and I made a new friend today!”
    “Really? That’s wonderful!”
    “Two new friends, actually,” Robert said, smiling as he thought of Pip and Squeak underneath his bed, their whiskered snouts just inches away from his mother’s delicate ankles.

EIGHT

    Robert spent most of the weekend playing with his new friends. During the day, he brought them to his neighborhood park. At night, they stayed up late together, eating snacks by flashlight under the blankets. Pip favored chocolate cupcakes with white filling. Squeak preferred peanut butter cookies. They both loved hard pretzels and scattered crumbs all over Robert’s sheets.
    Their intelligence was extraordinary. After just a few hours, Robert had trained them to obey simple commands such as “sit” and “stay” and “roll over.” By Sunday night, they were executing even more complicated tasks. “Bring me a comic book,” Robertwould say. And Pip and Squeak dutifully walked over to his shelves, retrieved a comic book, and carried it in their mouths back to their master.
    Robert rewarded them with more pretzels. “Two heads are definitely better than one,” he said, gently stroking their necks and back. “You guys are twice as smart as the average rat. Maybe even smarter.”
    He went online to research two-headed animals. They were a lot more common than he’d realized. He found photographs of two-headed cows, two-headed pigs, even a two-headed crocodile. The scientific name for the condition was
polycephaly
. Robert found several articles about polycephaly in medical journals, but they were all too complicated for him to understand. Yet one of them caught his attention because its author, Crawford Tillinghast, lived right there in Dunwich, Massachusetts, just a mile or two from Robert’s house.
    Robert walked downstairs to the living room, where his mother was folding laundry on the sofa. “Hey, did you ever hear of a man named Crawford Tillinghast?”
    “Sure,” she said. “You remember that giant mansion on East Chestnut Street? The one they finally knocked down last year? That’s where he lived. He was some kind of scientist.”
    “Does he still live in Dunwich?”
    “Oh, no, honey. He died thirty years ago. There was a house fire, I think. Why do you ask?”
    Robert shrugged. “No reason.”
    His mother laughed. “When I was real little, we used to joke that his house was haunted. You’d go out there at night and see all kinds of crazy lights flashing in his windows. We used to dare one another to run up his steps and ring the