“Or worse stuff,” Erika interrupted with a shudder.
“Or worse stuff,” Abby agreed. “But kids have always known the place is haunted. When it comes to things like this, kids always know best.”
“I guess we’ll never find out what was up in the attic,” said Erika. “But I read somewhere that witches had special pets, called familiars, like black cats and talking toads. Maybe what we saw was like the ghosts of those pets.”
Abby shook her head. “I’m pretty sure there was just one thing in the end. But, who knows, maybe they were just killer dust kitties.” In spite of everything, she began to laugh—a good laugh this time.
“Or bunnies,” said Erika, beginning to laugh herself.
“Whatever. I only know they—or it—can have that old place all to themselves.” Their laughter quieted in the evening stillness. Walking side by side, the two friends headed back down the road to home and never once looked back.
Many
“I found it in the attic,” said Raymond, pulling a brown paper bag with something long and flat inside from his backpack. “It was with my grandmother’s junk.” He and his friends—Troy, Jerry, Sarah, and Mikal—were sitting in the sunlit backyard of Troy’s house. The others crowded around as he unwrapped a bright-colored box.
“It’s a game,” Troy said, sounding disappointed.
“No way,” Raymond insisted. “It’s a Ouija board.” He pronounced the word “wee-jah” and opened the box to reveal a folded board that did look like a game board. But when he unfolded it, they saw just a bunch of numbers, letters, and a few circled words scattered around. From the box he took a little piece of wood, shaped like a triangle, with small, stubby legs at each of the three corners. A circle of green felt was stuck to the bottom of each leg.
His friends peered closer.
“But what is it?” asked Mikal, whose voice always sounded whiny. “What does it do?” As he leaned closer, his glasses slid down his perpetually oily nose so he had to push them back into place.
“Don’t you watch any scary movies?” Jerry asked. “A Ouija board lets you talk to ghosts and stuff.”
“Like a cell phone?”
“You are so dense,” Jerry said, “I can’t believe it.”
Before he could say anything more, Sarah said, “You put your fingers on the little pointy wooden thing—”
“A planchette,” Raymond read off the box lid. He pronounced it “plan-shet.”
“Uh-huh,” Sarah said impatiently, “and then the spirits move it around the board to answer questions, yes or no, here”—she tapped the words, which were in circles in the upper corners of the board—“or it spells out answers in these letters or numbers.” She pointed at the double row of letters—the whole alphabet—and the single row of numbers, from one to nine, then zero, below. There were also the words hello and good-bye in circles at the lower corners of the board.
“How do you know so much about it?” challenged Troy.
“I watched a show about real-life ghostbusters last year,” Sarah explained. “It showed how these things work. These guys in this old house tried to get in touch with a ghost using one.”
“Did they talk to a ghost?” wondered Mikal.
“I don’t know. My mom made me shut the TV off and go to bed.”
“Let’s try it,” Jerry said.
Sarah rolled her eyes at him. “You need to be in the right place. Someplace where there are ghosts. Your house isn’t haunted, is it, Troy? Anyone die here?”
Troy shook his head fiercely. “No way. My folks wouldn’t buy a haunted house.”
“Raymond, your grandma died last year. Do you think her ghost is hanging around your house?” asked Sarah.
The boy made a face. “She died in the hospital. Anyway, she was too nice to haunt anybody.”
“My hamster, Loopy, died last month,” Sarah said. “Some people think that animals can come back as ghosts. Alicia Downey said her white rat came back as a little ball of white light that used to run around her bedroom.”
“Get a grip,” Raymond said. “First of all, everyone knows Alicia is nuts. And you want to call up the ghost of your hamster. Oo—ooo—oo—ooo! I am the ghost of Loopy. Booga-booga!” Raymond shook his hands at her.
Sarah giggled and pulled back, nearly falling off her seat on a low garden bench. “Okay,” she admitted, “dumb idea.”
“Besides,” Mikal added, as if he was seriously considering the possibility of such a haunting, “hamsters can’t spell, so we’d never get any answers to our questions from this weejee thing.”
To his puzzlement, the others burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
Raymond always felt a little sorry for Mikal, who never seemed to get it. He said quickly, “We’re laughing at ourselves because we were too dumb to figure that out for ourselves.”
The others, following his lead, made an effort to stifle their laughter. They failed as a fresh round of guffaws erupted. This time Mikal laughed, too, though he still looked somewhat puzzled.
“So where could we test this thing?” Troy asked, serious again.
They were all silent for a few moments and then Jerry said, “How about that apartment house over on Seventeenth Street that burned two weeks ago? Two people on the first floor died there, and a fireman got killed.”
“Perfect,” said Raymond, quickly adding, “I don’t mean that it’s good anyone died—just that it could work.”
“I went by the building a couple of days ago,” said Sarah thoughtfully. “There’s a big pile of burned wood and stuff out front, and the place still smells of smoke. You can even see some of that yellow police tape on the front door and other places. I got off my bike just to check it out, and I was just sitting there, looking, when this kid comes running down the alley, carrying a big old fancy clock with burns on it. He stopped when he saw me looking at the clock. ‘What are you lookin’ at?’ he asked. Then he said, ‘They’re dead. They sure don’t need any clock now.’ After that, he ran off down the street. Anyhow, I figured he’d somehow gotten inside the place. Since there was no one else around, I pushed my bike down the alley and found out how he got in—”
“How?” the others asked.
“There’s a piece of plywood over a back window that looks like it’s nailed shut, but you can pull it back easily.”
“Did you go in?” Troy wondered.
“No, I was afraid to leave my bike where kids were ripping off stuff. But I bet nothing has changed.”
“Sounds good,” Raymond pronounced. “Guys?” His friends all nodded, sealing the deal. Then Mikal said, as an afterthought, “Won’t we be breaking the law? I mean, trespassing.”
“It’s not like we’re going to hurt anything,” said Raymond dismissively. “It’s burned up anyway. The people won’t care—like the kid said, they’re dead. As long as we don’t take anything, what’s the problem?”
After a minute, Mikal nodded, though there was still a somewhat doubtful look on his face. But the others knew that, in the end, Mikal always wanted to be included in their group, so he’d go along with them sooner or later.
“When?” Jerry asked.
“Day after tomorrow—Saturday,” said Raymond. “We’ll tell everyone we’re going to that matinee movie at the Plaza, Puffed Up or whatever the name is.”
“Get the story straight,” Sarah insisted (she always had a good head for details). “The movie is Puffins on Parade, and it’s G-rated, so everyone’s folks will be happy, and it’s at the MetaPlex, not the AMC Plaza.”
“Whatever,” muttered Raymond, with a shrug.
“We can meet at twelve-thirty, right after lunch, at the corner of Seventeenth and Rosewood.”
“But if anything goes wrong, we ditch,” said Mikal.
“I think I got it,” Jerry said. “Plan A: We get into the building and see what the Ouija can do. Plan B—”
“Ditch,” said Mikal, folding his arms, pleased that he had cont
ributed something useful.
“Okay,” said Troy, “we’re covered. We either dig up some spirits or we split.”
Since it was now late on Thursday afternoon, the friends began to drift home: to dinner, to homework, to video games, or just to TV watching. Raymond was the last to leave, carefully repacking the Ouija box into the paper bag and replacing it in his knapsack.
“Think it’ll work?” asked Troy. “That Ouija thing?”
“Maybe,” Raymond answered. “My gran must have thought so; she hung on to it. I mean, what have we got to lose?”
“Nothing, I guess,” said Troy. But, for just a minute, he seemed more uncertain than Mikal at his most doubtful.
With a shrug, Raymond stood, high-fiving his friend.
“Saturday,” he said. “Saturday,” Troy echoed as Raymond let himself out the backyard gate.
Not surprisingly, Mikal was the last to show up on Saturday. Raymond was just about to write him off when he came around the corner, frantically pedaling his bike. None of the others believed him when he said his dad had given him extra morning chores. They just looked at one another, sure that he had almost chickened out, until the fear of missing the adventure had made him decide to risk it.
“Let’s push our bikes the rest of the way, so we can check out the ’hood, see if there could be any trouble from kids like the one Sarah saw.”
The five walked along, making a show of chattering innocently, all the while keeping alert for police cars or meddling adults or older kids who might find it fun to intimidate a band of fourth-graders.
But the few people they passed paid them little or no attention. They reached the tall boarded-up two-story without a challenge.
Everyone stood for a moment, staring at the mound of junk in front of the deserted building: burned wood, a charred sofa, scorched mattresses, water-soaked books and clothes. It spilled off the sidewalk over the curb and into the gutter. In the still, cool air, the smell of burn and smoke was thick.
They took a last look up and down the street, freezing when one, two, three cars rolled by.
When the street was quiet again, Sarah said, “The alley is really deep—we can store our bikes way at the end. No one will see them in the shadows.”
Single-file—Raymond at the front, Mikal at the rear—they steered their bikes down the alley. Luckily, the wall of the building facing the burned apartment house was windowless, so there was no chance of their being noticed by the neighbors.
They left their bikes propped up against some garbage cans and recycle bins, in an unlocked but fenced-in area at the back of the house. Raymond carefully removed the Ouija box from his backpack.
Sarah led the others to the window with the loose covering and signaled Raymond to help. The two pulled back the sheet of plywood, revealing a blackened window frame, empty except for a coat of glass dust on the window ledge, where heat had caused the paint to blister.
Jerking his head, Raymond urged Jerry to climb through. Awkwardly, with much grunting and groaning, the heavyset boy went through. Troy went next. Then Mikal, who managed to get a sliver of glass in his thumb and broke the rule of silence to yelp and announce he’d been seriously injured.
Raymond hissed at him, “Shut up or go home!” Mikal, waving his hand around, quieted down and scrambled the rest of the way through. With the others helping from inside, Sarah clambered through. Raymond passed the Ouija to her and then followed. They eased the plywood back into place as quietly as possible.
There was only minimal light in the little room they found themselves in. It might have been a bedroom. But all the furnishings had been stripped out, so they couldn’t be sure. The smell of burned wood was extremely thick: It seemed to catch in their throats. Mikal began to cough loudly.
“Knock it off,” Raymond said impatiently.
Obediently, Mikal tried to muffle his coughing by clamping both hands over his mouth, but he continued to cough as they moved through the nearby rooms—guided by beams from the flashlights Sarah, Jerry, and Troy had brought. They crossed a kitchen, where a fire-blackened stove and refrigerator remained. Next they entered what must have been a dining room: There was a built-in cabinet, its glass-paned front cracked and smoked. Sarah couldn’t resist pulling open one door. Inside were carefully stacked dishes, wineglasses, a china tea set—waiting for the owners who would never return. Sarah lifted out a dainty porcelain figurine of a ballerina, looked at it, then sighed and carefully replaced it. She secured the door before she followed the others into the big room beyond.
“Probably the living room,” said Raymond, keeping his voice low.
There was an unburned chunk of carpet in one corner of the largish space. They could still make out a faint pattern on the well-worn floor covering. The smell of burning wasn’t quite as bad here. There was even a faint draft blowing through the cracks in the plywood slabs covering the shattered picture window that had, in happier days, looked out on Seventeenth Street.
Raymond said, “This is perfect. Let’s sit. Hey, Jerry—easy with the flashlight.” His friend had been shining the beam over walls and ceiling, checking out the area. “We don’t want to let people know what we’re up to.” Jerry dutifully snapped it off, since there was enough illumination from Sarah’s and Troy’s flashlights to see by.
“I used my computer to check out some things,” said Sarah, as they sat in a circle and Raymond unfolded the board. He set the planchette on the center, its tip vaguely pointing toward the yes circle.
“This floor is gross,” Mikal interrupted, wiping his hand on his jeans leg.
“Then stand up,” Raymond snapped.
Mikal made a few more faces but stayed seated. His coughing had finally stopped.
“Do you mind if I finish?” asked Sarah, clearly annoyed. The others turned to look at her. “Anyhow, I read up on the fire here. The couple who lived here, the Crowleys—the ones who died—were kind of weird. Their neighbors said they weren’t very friendly, and no one seems to know what kind of jobs they had. One woman said she’d seen Mrs. Crowley buying black candles over at Hillcrest Mall.” She paused dramatically.
The boys looked at each other. “So what?” said Mikal, confused.
“Black candles, devil worship, duh,” she said, not looking directly at Mikal, whose face and ears burned red.
“And”—Sarah was clearly on a roll—“when I Googled ‘Ouija board,’ I found an entry—wait, I printed it out.” She took a sheet of paper from her jacket pocket, unfolded it, and read, “Spirits with negative attitudes are the ones most likely to try and make contact through means like the Ouija board. The gravest danger is that it might attract the class of demons called ‘soul snarers.’ ”
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Troy. “What is a soul snarer?”
“I’ll tell you, if you let me.” She continued reading, “Soul snarers catch the souls of people who have just died—before the soul crosses over to the proper place of the dead. These unfortunates become slaves for all eternity. The strongest of these demons”—here Sarah paused dramatically—“can even cause people to die before their heaven-appointed time.”
“They can kill people,” Mikal said. His voice sounded very small in the semidarkness.
The girl nodded. While the others sat staring at each other, Sarah folded up the paper and tucked it back into her pocket.
“Are you trying to scare us?” asked Raymond, breaking the silence.
“I just thought it was interesting,” Sarah said defensively.
“Yeah, okay,” Raymond said. “If anyone wants to chicken out, now is the time.”
No one made a move.
“Fine. Let’s get going—we’ll have to be heading home soon if we’re going to use going to the movies as a cover story. So, everyone put a finger on the planchette.”
All five did.
“Now what?” asked Troy.
“We ask questions,” Raymond said. “I’ll go first. Is anyone there?” he asked, speaking into the
darkness that seemed to press in on all sides of their pool of light.
The planchette twitched.
“Stop moving it, Mikal,” said Sarah. “It has to move by itself.”
“I wasn’t pushing it,” Mikal whined.
Troy and Jerry swore they hadn’t been up to anything either.
“Well, whoever’s doing it, stop already,” Sarah ordered, “or you can’t be part of this.” No one was clear exactly to whom she was speaking. “Is there anyone there?” she asked, repeating the earlier question.
This time the planchette jerked, then swerved to the yes.
“It isn’t me,” Mikal insisted, without being accused.
But the others paid no attention to him; their eyes were fixed on the little wooden triangle under their fingertips.
“How many of you are there?” Raymond spoke again.
The planchette moved to four letters, M-A-N-Y.
“How many?” Jerry asked.
M-A-N-Y.
“Are you ghosts?” Raymond took charge again.
The planchette was still a moment and then swerved to yes. Then it shifted across to no.
“I don’t get it,” said Troy.
“He—they—whoever—doesn’t seem to know what it is,” suggested Jerry. His voice sounded dry and nervous.
When Raymond asked the next question, he lowered his voice, as if it might offend whoever or whatever was working the board. “Are you the people who died here?”
“The answer was ‘many.’ But only two people died here,” protested Jerry.
“Three—the fireman,” said Sarah.
“That’s still not enough to be many.”
“Will you guys shut up?” Raymond snarled, and then added unnecessarily, “The planchette’s not working now.”
But they could all see that the wooden triangle was frozen in place, pointing at nothing in particular. Only Mikal had removed his finger.
Haunted Houses Page 10
