When their house in Tampa, Florida, burns down, 14-year-old Nick Slate loses his mother to the flames. The surviving family members move to an old, dilapidated Victorian house in Colorado Springs that they inherited from Nick’s great-aunt Greta.

On the day they arrive, Nick and his younger brother Danny open the trap door to the attic, which has a ladder that pulls down and retracts, as on a spaceship. Nick climbs it and promptly gets hit by a falling toaster. Bleeding profusely from a forehead wound, Nick is rushed to the hospital, where he gets four stitches. On the way home, his dad extols the heroic virtues of a forehead scar—he mentions Harry Potter’s famous one—and gives Nick his choice of bedrooms.

Nick goes upstairs and climbs carefully into the attic, a large room with a pyramid ceiling and a lot of old junk: moth-eaten furniture, a ruined bicycle, a box camera, an old vacuum, a large tape recorder, and other odd things. He decides to hold a garage sale.