The Addams Family: The Story of the Movie. Calliope Glass

      A faded sign hanging from the gate banged in the wind. STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE, it read. The building had clearly been lying empty for a long time, with the apparent exception of the hulking wreck of a man they’d struck with their car.

      Said wreck was now peeling himself off the pavement and lumbering towards Morticia and Gomez. His arms were held stiffly out in front of him, and he gave a cavernous howl.

      ‘NNNNYYYAAAAAGH,’ the hulk roared. He was close enough to crush Morticia and Gomez in one motion.

      Gomez smiled cheerfully and stuffed their bags into his hands.

      ‘Thank you, old boy,’ he said. ‘Lead the way!’

      The monster looked down at the bags, surprised. Then he shrugged and led Morticia and Gomez through the gate and towards the abandoned insane asylum.

      Morticia smiled happily. How convenient that they had found a house that already had a butler! She watched him lurch up the path. Lurch … what a perfect name. Lurch the butler.

      Morticia took Gomez’s arm, and they followed Lurch to the front door of the house. Gomez gallantly swept the POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS tape away from the front door, and they stepped in.

      Stale, cold air and absolute silence greeted them. Then a faint sound came through the blackness: the scratching of rats scampering in the walls.

      Morticia’s eyes adjusted to the dark. She squinted down the front hall. There was a chalk outline of a body near the staircase.

      ‘It’s creepy,’ Gomez said thoughtfully. ‘Kooky.’

      Morticia looked up and caught the eye of a stuffed moose head. It winked at her.

      ‘Mysterious,’ she agreed. ‘Spooky.’

      Plop! Plop! Blood dripped from the ceiling.

      Gomez brushed a spider the size of a pigeon off his shoulder. ‘It’s altogether … what’s the word?’ he murmured, looking thoughtful.

      Lurch lumbered up to the pipe organ at the top of the grand staircase. Thing scurried over and hopped up on to the keyboard. Together, the two of them plunked out the few notes of a decidedly twisted little tune.

      ‘GETTTTT OUTTTTT,’ a voice like a sinking ship moaned, interrupting the music. It seemed to come from every hall, from every nook and every cranny. The whole house trembled.

      Morticia and Gomez jumped.

      ‘It’s hideous!’ Morticia exclaimed.

      ‘It’s horrible!’ Gomez agreed.

      ‘It’s home,’ they sighed in unison. Gomez dipped Morticia into a dramatic kiss in the doorway of their dream house, and Lurch took up the odd little tune again, with Thing snapping in cheerful rhythm.

      

       Thirteen Years Later …

      A THICK FOG still wrapped itself around the hill. Anyone passing by the wrought-iron gate would be surprised to discover that a hulking house lurked beyond the blanket of mist. But nobody ever stopped to investigate … and nobody had even noticed that the old asylum sign had been replaced with a new sign:

      THE ADDAMS FAMILY

      The sun was rising, but no light reached the house at the top of the hill. The clouds cloaked it far too snugly. And to make matters worse – or better, if you were an Addams – a torrential downpour was falling on this particular morning.

      Morticia threw open the window and smiled as a sheet of freezing rain hit her square in the face.

      ‘What a lovely morning!’ she exclaimed cheerfully. The window slammed itself shut, barely missing Morticia’s fingers. She smiled slyly.

      ‘Nice try,’ she murmured. The spirit of the house had been doing its best to wound, maim or kill the Addamses since they’d moved in. Morticia found it extremely charming. She’d always wanted to live in a haunted house – you were never home alone with a poltergeist, after all.

      ‘GET OUUUUT!’ The hollow, echoing scream floated through the corridors. Morticia rolled her eyes affectionately.

      ‘Oh, you’re always so grumpy before your morning coffee,’ she said. She picked up the coffee pot she’d brought upstairs from the kitchen for just this purpose and walked into the bathroom.

      Plsh – Morticia carefully poured the steaming black coffee into the toilet and flushed it.

      ‘Better?’ she asked.

      ‘AAAAAAAAAAH,’ sighed the house. The floorboards and rafters creaked softly as the entire building settled down and began to vibrate very gently.

      Morticia patted the door frame affectionately.

      The house had been fed. Now it was time for the children. She pressed a button on a call box mounted on the wall.

      ‘Lurch,’ Morticia murmured into the speaker, ‘it’s time for breakfast.’

      Several storeys down, in the sub-sub-basement of the former asylum, Lurch sat on his bed, reading. It had been thirteen years since the Addamses had hit him with their car on that fateful night, and he had been their loyal butler ever since. It beat wandering around an abandoned mental asylum, after all. Lurch gently placed the book next to his other books and groaned as he sat up. With a great creaking and popping of joints, the hulking zombie of a man stood up and shuffled out of the padded cell he called a bedroom, his head scraping along the mattress-covered ceiling.

      Morticia’s next stop was the office, to find Thing. The disembodied hand jumped when she opened the door.

      ‘Thing!’ Morticia said. ‘Get Ichabod to wake the children.’

      She swept down the hallway, and Thing scuttled along ahead of her, swinging open a window and nimbly climbing out of it. Meanwhile, Morticia continued her morning rounds. She caught up with Lurch as he emerged from the kitchen with the breakfast tray. Once the meal was on the table, Morticia sent Lurch off on another task.

      ‘It’s time to begin dusting up for the party,’ she said. There wasn’t that much time left before the big event, and Morticia wanted everything to look perfect. Lurch nodded and obediently headed down the hall to fetch the vacuum cleaner. He looked at the wall critically as he went – a single droplet of blood was trickling down the wallpaper. Lurch shook his head and sighed. Poltergeists. He banged the wall a couple of times with his fist, and the entire surface began oozing blood.

      There, that was better.

      The old, broken vacuum cleaner was stored in the cupboard off the pantry. When Lurch turned it on, it began spewing dust all over everything. Lurch nodded in satisfaction. He carefully pointed it at the sofa, then at the candelabra, then finally at the picture frames on the wall. Soon the room was coated in a thick blanket of stale-smelling dust. It looked perfect. Lurch almost smiled, his cheeks creaking stiffly, before his face went back to its usual wooden blankness. He continued dusting.

      The racket of the vacuum cleaner roared through the west wing of the house, but on the second storey, in the east wing, everything was quiet and peaceful. Two children slept snug in their beds. Ten-year-old Pugsley was huddled under his covers, his head shoved under his pillow. Nearby, in her own room, his thirteen-year-old sister Wednesday slept sweetly in a bed rigged beneath a guillotine, her bare neck stretched out under the razor-sharp blade.

      First the window to Pugsley’s room slid open, then the window to Wednesday’s. As the two children slept, wooden tentacles slipped into their rooms through the open windows. Smooth, grasping vines crept across the floor and hovered for a moment over the children’s sleeping forms.

      Then,