The Haunting of Henry Davis

by Kathryn Siebel

  * * *

  —

  But there must have been at least some small part of Zack that was willing to believe me, because instead of running off to play tetherball, he came looking for me on the playground after lunch. “Hey,” he said. “What makes you think it was a ghost Henry saw up in the window?”

  “Well, for one thing, this isn’t the first time it’s happened,” I told him. “But look, I shouldn’t have told you any of this. Henry’s going to be really mad. Promise not to tell, okay?”

  “About what?” asked Renee as she walked up to join us.

  “About Barbara Anne spilling the beans,” Zack said.

  “Maybe we can help him,” Renee said. “He’s not going to be mad if we help him get rid of it.”

  And as soon as she said it, I realized that she might have a point.

  “How do we do that?” Zack asked.

  “No idea,” I told them.

  * * *

  —

  But then, later, during silent reading time, Renee asked, “Do you know anything about him, this ghost?”

  “Just his name,” I said. “Edgar.”

  “What?” Zack asked. “He introduced himself?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “We used a Ouija board.”

  “Wow,” Renee said. “Did you ask him anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “How he died, why he’s there, what he wants.”

  I stared at her for a second. It was such a good list of questions. I almost wanted to write it down. “No,” I said. “We didn’t think of any of that. I guess we were just so freaked out to get any answer at all.”

  “He was probably murdered,” Zack said.

  “You don’t have anything to contribute to this conversation,” I told him. “You don’t even think he’s real.”

  “True,” Zack said. “But I still say he was murdered.”

  “Or, maybe his dad died at sea and he’s waiting for him to come back,” Renee said. “Oh, maybe he drowned! They didn’t give kids swimming lessons back in the day like they do now. Wait! What’s he look like?”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “It’s a clue,” Renee said. “Like if he’s dripping wet or bloody or carrying something strange. Oh! Does he say anything?”

  “Well, one time when Henry saw him, Edgar was carrying a yo-yo,” I said. “And he asked Henry to play with him.”

  “Sounds terrifying,” Zack said.

  I glared at him. “We’re trying to figure out more,” I said. “We have some stuff. Henry has this letter, this section of a letter, but it’s pretty confusing.”

  “You have a letter written by a ghost?” Renee asked.

  “We don’t know who wrote it,” I said. “It’s written to some guy named Thomas, but it isn’t signed, and we’re not even sure what it’s about yet. And we have a book, a sort of scrapbook/yearbook thing. But we’re not exactly sure what that means either, or why it was up there.”

  “Where?” Zack asked.

  “In the trunk,” I said. “From the attic. At Henry’s house. It wasn’t easy getting it either. We tried to smash the lock off with a rock. Henry cut his hand wide open.”

  “That’s why he got those stitches?” Renee asked.

  I nodded. “His dad got it open later—with a crowbar!”

  “Wow,” Zack said. And for somebody who didn’t believe in ghosts, he seemed pretty curious about the whole thing. “Where’s the stuff now? I want to see.”

  “Henry’s got most of it,” I said. “But the yearbook thing is in my locker.”

  “Go get it,” Renee said. “I want to see too.”

  So I fetched it, and we all had a look. It wasn’t easy, because every time Biniam came anywhere near our pod, we had to stuff it back into my desk and pretend we were busy reading our books.

  “Do you think it belonged to him?” Renee whispered. “Was it Edgar’s book?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  But when we flipped through the book, looking for his picture and his name, we didn’t find him. These kids were older anyway. Their pictures were just small squares that looked like they’d been cut out of an old newspaper and pasted into the book. I couldn’t decide exactly what it was, but there was something creepy about them too. Maybe it was the way the ink had started to fade. They seemed to be looking out at us from a haze or fog. Smiling. Like they knew something that we didn’t. They had strange, old-fashioned names, like Evangeline. But we didn’t see anyone named Edgar.

  “Check inside the front cover,” Zack said. “See if there’s a name.”

  And inside the front cover, it said:

  This Book Belongs to

  P. Winterson

  “Look at that,” I said. “It’s the fanciest cursive writing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Biniam’s coming!” Zack said. And I hid the book in my desk.

  When Biniam came over to our pod, we all thought she was going to yell at us for talking, or ask to see what we’d been looking at, but instead she just said, “Barbara Anne, I was wondering if you might want to take Henry’s homework to him. He might be out for a while.”

  “Sure,” I said, and I reached to grab the folder she was handing me. Then I looked inside Henry’s desk to find his math book. And that’s the first time it happened. A blue marble rolled out of Henry’s desk and onto the floor. I didn’t really think much about it that time. I just put it in my pocket, thinking I would give it to Henry later. But I never did. It ended up on my dresser, and I forgot all about it for a while.

  I was thinking of other things. On the walk over to Henry’s house, I kept wondering if he would be able to tell, right away, that I’d betrayed him. I’m not good at hiding what I’m thinking. Whatever the opposite of a poker face is, that’s what I have. I was sort of hoping that Henry would be sleeping when I got there, but no such luck. He was on the couch in the living room watching television. He waved at me as soon as his dad let me in, and he looked so happy to see me that it almost broke my heart.

  “Better keep your distance, Barbara Anne,” his dad told me. “We don’t want you coming down with this too.”

  “True,” I said. “I really just came to drop off the homework.”

  “Oh, you can stay for a minute,” his dad said, and he motioned me to a chair as he started to leave. “Henry probably wants to hear all about what he missed at school today.”

  That made me gulp. But before Henry could ask me anything, we both spotted them through the window—Zack and Renee, heading toward Henry’s front door. Renee had a scraggly-looking bunch of flowers in her hand. I was betting that Zack had ripped them out of someone’s yard on the way over.

  “Hey, look,” Henry said. “It’s Zack and Renee.”

  “What are they doing here?” I asked, already beginning to panic.

  “I guess they’re coming to check on me, same as you,” Henry said. He was smiling, but I barely had time to notice. I was already on my way to the door.

  “He’s fine,” I said. “Thanks for coming. I’ll take those.” I reached for the flowers with one hand and started to close the door with the other.

  “Barbara Anne, don’t be so rude. Ask them in,” Henry said from the couch.

  “Yeah, Barbara Anne,” said Zack. “Ask us in.”

  Zack had a smirk on his face, and I whispered to him, “Don’t say ANYTHING!”

  Renee was even worse. She kept wandering slowly through the room and staring at the ceiling like she expected Edgar to materialize at any moment.

  “What’s wrong, Renee?” Henry asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I…just…your house is so…interesting.”

  “Yeah,” Zack said. “Not that we know anything about it, but—”
<
br />   “No,” I said. “How could you?”

  Henry looked at the three of us, confused for a minute. But Henry is pretty smart, and we weren’t fooling him one bit. He let out an exhausted sigh. “Barbara Anne!” he said. “You promised you wouldn’t tell.”

  I said the only thing I could say. “I didn’t mean to, Henry. I’m really sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  My grandmother was over at my house when I got home, and she took one look at me and asked, “Why so glum, Bitsy?”

  “Henry’s sick,” I said. Of course, I left out the part about what I’d done, and how, sick or well, Henry might not want to spend much time with me in the foreseeable future because of it.

  “Oh dear,” my grandmother said. “What’s wrong with Henry?”

  “He has the flu or something,” I said.

  “Bronchitis,” my mother told her, unloading a bag of groceries.

  “Same thing,” I said.

  “It most certainly is NOT the same thing,” said my grandmother. “The flu can be very serious. Deadly.”

  “Who ever died of the flu?” I asked her, grabbing for a cookie.

  “Lots of people,” she said. “And those are for after dinner.”

  “Of the flu?” I asked. “The flu is like a cold.”

  “If you’re lucky,” she said. “When my father was a child, they shut the schools because of the Spanish flu. So many people were dying, they were running out of coffins.”

  “Mom!” my mother said.

  “What? I’m explaining history!” my grandmother said.

  “You’re scaring your granddaughter,” my mother told her. “Honey, Henry has bronchitis, not the Spanish flu. He’s going to be just fine. Stop worrying about him and go get started on your homework.”

  And, of course, my mother was right. Henry did get better—for a while.

  Henry made it back to school just in time for Halloween. You would think he would be celebrating that fact, but Henry hadn’t forgotten that I’d told the rest of the pod about Edgar. How could he? Renee kept bringing it up, even though I repeatedly begged her not to. Every other comment from her started with “Can I just ask you one thing?” And then she would want to know “Does he always show up in the same spot?” or “Is he solid, or can you see right through him?” or “Doesn’t the rest of your family know he’s there?”

  And the more she kept asking, the longer Henry stayed mad at me.

  “Why did you have to tell them?” Henry asked, more than once.

  “I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “It just slipped out.”

  “Just slipped out? How does that even come up in conversation, Barbara Anne? At school? ‘What answer did you get for number four, oh, and by the way, did you know Henry’s house is haunted?’ ”

  “It just—”

  “Never mind,” Henry said. “Soon the whole school will know about it, but whatever. It would have been faster to take out an ad on a billboard, Barbara Anne.”

  And it went on like that. He was really mad. In those moments, he hated me with the same steely concentration my grandmother uses to copy down order numbers off the Home Shopping Network.

  * * *

  —

  And Henry’s continued anger wasn’t even the only thing I had to face at school. Biniam was threatening to ruin Halloween.

  “I’m not saying you can’t have fun,” she said.

  “Here it comes,” Zack whispered.

  “But it’s important to be safe.”

  This is how it always goes. Before you even make a plan, some adult is telling you why it’s too dangerous. It’s like some horrible math problem: amount of fun at Halloween = excitement + sugar + costumes + adventure + friends – (safety rules + parents who won’t let you go out alone even in a group of one hundred kids + people who give you an apple or a toothbrush or pocket change because they didn’t even remember it WAS Halloween).

  Biniam was on the side of the toothbrush people. To be fair, she was paid to be. That’s why she started in with the rules on the board. And she did it in the worst possible way—by making us come up with them ourselves, like it was our idea. Classic teacher move. Even I didn’t fall for it, and let’s face it, my hand is pretty much permanently up in the air.

  “Yes, Renee,” Ms. Biniam said.

  “No masks,” Renee said.

  “That’s a good one. Anything else?” Ms. Biniam asked, all smiles, like she was a waitress offering to bring us pie. “Alonzo?”

  “No weapons,” Alonzo said.

  “Yes! School policy. Good reminder. Would you like to come up and add that to the board?”

  Zack looked disgusted. He was leaning back with his hands crossed over his chest. Biniam gave him a look that meant he should stop tipping the chair back on two legs already, but Zack ignored her. Typical. But then he did something really un-Zack-like. He raised his hand.

  “Yes, Zachary?” Ms. Biniam asked.

  “I don’t want to say what I’m going to be, because that would ruin the surprise, but it does have something that comes with it….”

  “Okay,” Ms. Biniam said slowly. “But remember, right now we’re just listing some rules—really just some…good reminders, let’s say—about how to have a safe Halloween, okay? So let’s finish our list.”

  Zack put his hand down for a while, and the list grew. It was the worst group assignment ever: we were ruining our own Halloween.

  When Zack raised his hand a second time, Ms. Biniam called on him before she was even all the way turned around. (It was almost like she had eyes in the back of her head. Which, by the way, would be a GREAT costume.)

  “Is this a question, Zachary, or a comment?” she asked.

  “A question,” Zack said. He looked really indignant, but also confused, like if he didn’t spit it out fast, he might completely forget what he wanted to say.

  “Go on,” said Ms. Biniam.

  “Well, an axe is really more of a tool than a weapon,” Zack told her.

  “No weapons,” said Ms. Biniam with a tight smile. “School policy.”

  * * *

  —

  That’s why it was so hard for the class to come up with our Halloween costumes: nine million rules that we wrote ourselves! At library/computer time, we were allowed to pick a book first or use the computer. Everybody was over by the limit-of-three Halloween books, and that’s why I went on the computer first—to this one educational site that the filters don’t block. And I found out all about Halloween. Like, for example, did you know that Halloween began a really long time ago as this other holiday (called Samhain)? Well, it did. Like, a really long time ago. Two thousand years. And then they kept changing the name until they finally ended up with Halloween.

  And wearing masks? That got started because people believed that spirits returned on Halloween night and wandered the streets. The only safe way to go out into the night was to wear a mask, so the ghosts would mistake you for one of their own. It was basically like a game of ghost/human hide-and-seek.

  It was all pretty interesting. That’s why I went to find Henry, to tell him. And also, to see if he would talk to me. But he wasn’t at the computers or with the kids who were pulling books from the shelves.

  Then I spotted him—all by himself in a big, cushy chair in the corner. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, staring out the window. When I got closer, I could see that he had a sketchbook open on his lap. And it was the weirdest thing. It looked like he was writing, but he wasn’t looking down at all. I figured maybe he was just doodling. Or maybe he saw something outside, where the sky was turning gray. A rainstorm was just beginning. As I walked toward Henry, the lights in the library flickered.

  “What if the power goes out?” I heard Renee asking the librarian. “Do we get to go home?”

 
; She didn’t answer because she was telling everyone to line up. It was time to go back to class. Even if we had no electricity, even if the roof caved in, the schedule would stay the same.

  “We have to line up,” Renee said. “Tell Henry. Where is Henry?”

  “Over there,” I said. “Trying to ignore me.”

  But when I turned to look at Henry again, I started to worry. He was staring right at us, but Henry looked so weird, like he was in some sort of trance.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Renee asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, you better go get him,” Renee said. “He’s gonna get in trouble.”

  I knew Renee was right, but it wasn’t as easy as she thought. Henry was in such a daze that I had to grab him by the arm and pull. “Henry!” I said. “What’s wrong with you? Stop playing games. It’s time to line up.” Henry was looking at me like he didn’t know who I was. I was relieved when he finally unfolded himself from the chair and moved toward the door.

  The rain started to really pour down then. No chance of outside recess. As we were leaving, I turned my head to say to Henry, “Guess we’re stuck inside again.” And that’s when I noticed that Henry had left his sketchbook behind on the chair. I was the very last person in line, so I went to get it for him. By the time I returned, the rest of the class was a little ahead of me, down the hall. As I walked toward them, I glanced at the page Henry had been working on, and it was the strangest thing.

  In the center of the page was a squiggle, like a line of cursive handwriting. Except that it didn’t form any words I could make sense of. It was too neat to be just a scribble, though. It looked too much like handwriting to be a random design. I couldn’t figure it out, and I hate it when I can’t figure things out. I could have asked Henry, I suppose, but he had been acting so weird that I was afraid he’d just snatch the sketchbook before I had a chance to solve the riddle.

  Back in the classroom, we had silent reading time. We got to sit wherever we wanted; this time I was the one who headed for a corner. I hid Henry’s sketchbook behind a big book about Egypt and stared at what Henry had drawn.