Revenge of Superstition Mountain

by Elise Broach

  “No…” Simon swung the flashlight back and forth, and the beam showed a dirt floor and a dark pile of burlap sacks. “Those are the sacks I was standing on, but I don’t see anything else. I have an idea. Let’s throw a granola bar down there. Maybe whatever it is will come out to eat it.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Jack cried. He scooted over to the backpack and grabbed a granola bar, ripping open the foil wrapper.

  “Drop it on the sacks where we can see it,” Simon told him.

  “Wait,” Delilah said. “We should crumble it up.” She took the bar from Jack and crunched it in her hands, scattering the crumbs where Simon shone the flashlight, over the dark pile of sacks.

  Henry hung back from the edge of the hole, watching with a mounting sense of dread.

  Simon continued to swing the flashlight beam across the sacks. “Do you see anything?” he asked Henry.

  Henry squinted into the darkness. “No,” he said finally, relieved. It was quiet in the cellar. The granola crumbs were untouched. “Maybe whatever it was isn’t there anymore.”

  Simon looked perplexed. “Huh. I figured it lived down there.”

  “Maybe it was a GHOST!” Jack said.

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Simon scoffed. “I told you that. Everybody be quiet for a minute and let’s see if we hear it.”

  They all stopped talking and listened. All Henry could hear was Jack’s loud breathing, and a bird twittering far away. There was no sound coming from the cellar.

  “Oh well,” Simon said. “I guess it isn’t there anymore. Let’s see if we can find a way upstairs to the rooms. First we need the keys, in case they’re locked. What were the room numbers, Delilah?”

  Delilah fished a yellow Post-it note out of her shorts pocket. “Julia Thomas was in room six,” she said. “The Petra … those German guys were in room five.”

  “The Petrasch brothers,” Henry said.

  Simon stepped carefully behind the high counter where rows of keys, brown with age, hung on a rack of hooks on the wall. “Here,” he said triumphantly. “Five!” Then he paused. “Huh. Six isn’t here.” He scanned the rows of hooks. “Oh well, there are some missing. Maybe we’ll be able to break in to the room without it.”

  “But how are we even going to get to the second floor?” Henry asked. “The bottom stairs are rotted away.” Even if they could think of a way to climb past the first few rotten steps, he had no confidence that the upper stairs would be sturdy enough to walk on. He had visions of trying to get to the second floor and then plummeting twelve or fourteen feet through the air. What if they broke through the boards again and fell into the cellar?

  “Let’s look around,” Simon said, shoving the key to room five in his pocket. “We didn’t go into the saloon last time.”

  Henry saw that there were double doors on the other side of the hotel’s lobby, with the remnants of colored glass windows inset into the upper panels. Shards of green and gold glass sparkled on the floor in front of them.

  “Watch your step,” Simon cautioned, leading the way.

  They stepped over the broken glass and pushed through the doors, which creaked loudly on rusted hinges. Beyond the threshold was a large room with a few broken chairs scattered around and a three-legged table in the center. Shafts of sun shone through the dusty windows, barely illuminating its contours. There was a long, high bar on one side. Behind the bar were rows of shelves, with broken glass covering them. There must have been a mirror back there, Henry realized. This was the bar where people sat to order drinks. He tried to picture the room in its heyday, crowded with cowboys and miners drinking whiskey and listening to music.

  “Wow! What kind of place is this?” Delilah said, gazing around. “Look at the old furniture.… And do you see the stuff on the walls?”

  “This is the place where everyone came to have fun,” Henry said, trying to think of an interesting-sounding word from all the books he had read that might describe it. “It must have been very … festive here.”

  “What’s that mean?” Jack demanded.

  “A place that would be perfect for parties.”

  In the dim light, Henry could make out a couple of light fixtures and some framed pictures on the wall. He walked over to one of them, a vertical rectangle slightly bigger than a magazine. It was a faded ink drawing of the hotel, with its sign hanging over the door and the black cat clearly visible. The picture frame was cracked, the glass broken.

  “They’re drawings,” he said. “This one’s of the hotel. The one next to it…” He peered at it more closely. “It looks like the town. We saw this church, remember? With the steeple?” He touched his fingertip lightly to the picture.

  Simon came over to stand beside him. “Yeah, that’s right. It’s the church at the end of the street. So this is what Gold Creek looked like back when people lived here! That means these are a hundred years old.” He sighed. “It’s too bad they’re in such bad shape.”

  Henry looked around the room. There were several more pictures, but they were all badly damaged, the paper discolored and torn, the ink so faded it was difficult to see what they depicted.

  “Here’s a picture of some guy,” Delilah offered. She pointed to what appeared to be a portrait of a man in an old-fashioned suit, with a thick handlebar mustache.

  “I wonder who that is,” Henry said.

  “Hey,” Jack called. He was poking around behind the bar. “There are stairs over here! In the corner. And they’re not broken!”

  “I thought so!” Simon said jubilantly. “Let’s find Julia Thomas’s room.”

  Jack started to bound up the stairs, but Henry grabbed his shirt. “Go slowly! Just in case.”

  They climbed the dark stairs and stepped onto the landing of an even darker hallway. It was lined with closed doors.

  “Do they still have the numbers on them?” Delilah asked.

  Simon shook his head. “Not all of them. But some do. Here, this is room three.” Simon pointed to a faded number painted high in the center of one of the doors. He tried the door handle, and it turned but the door stayed shut. “I don’t think they’re locked. Just stuck.”

  He leaned his shoulder against the door and pushed. It squeaked in protest, then popped open.

  They all crowded into the doorway. There were two windows overlooking the street, the glass in several panes broken, and paint peeled in large flakes off the walls. A thin, stained mattress lay in the corner, and a big, splintering wardrobe stood against the wall. Otherwise, the room was empty.

  “We should make sure there’s nothing inside here,” Delilah said, crossing the room to the wardrobe. She pulled on one of the knobs, then pulled harder. The door swung partway open and ground to a halt on the warped frame.

  She peered inside. “Nothing,” she said in disappointment.

  “Okay, let’s find rooms five and six and see if there’s anything in them. Then we can check the others,” Simon decided. He turned on the flashlight and shone it along the hallway, at the twin rows of closed doors.

  It was both quieter and darker up here than downstairs. Henry felt a thin prick of foreboding.

  But Jack walked fearlessly down the hallway. “This is four. This is five. This doesn’t have a number,” he announced, poking his finger at the last door on the left side of the hall.

  “Then maybe that’s six, Julia Thomas’s room,” Delilah said.

  Simon was already turning the door handle of room five and forcing his way inside. Henry, Jack, and Delilah crowded after him. The room had only a small window and was bare except for an empty glass bottle on the floor, thickly covered in dust, and a chair leaning against one wall. Its wooden seat was split down the middle.

  “Shine the flashlight on the floor,” Henry suggested, “in case there’s something there.”

  Simon waved the flashlight back and forth, casting light into the corners of the room. Besides the bottle, there wasn’t so much as a penny.

  “There’s NOTHING
up here,” Jack said dejectedly.

  “I wonder why the librarian and Officer Myers and Sara Delgado’s dad were talking about it, then,” Henry said. “Why did they think there would be something at the hotel?”

  “Probably the same reason we did,” Simon said. “Because Julia Thomas stayed here with the Petrasch brothers both before and after they climbed the mountain looking for the gold.”

  “But they wouldn’t have left the gold here if they found any,” Henry pointed out.

  “No,” Simon agreed, “but they might have left something else, something from their trip that would tell us if they did find gold, and where it might be.”

  “Well, they don’t seem to have left anything,” Henry argued. “And this place gives me a bad feeling. I think we should go.”

  “Okay, okay, but we have to check out room six,” Simon said.

  “Yeah, Henry,” Jack said reprovingly. “Don’t be a baby.”

  “If we all stick together, nothing bad will happen,” Delilah said. Henry wondered about her reasoning on this, since they had all been together when Delilah fell down the side of the canyon and when the avalanche happened. But before he had time to point that out, they were standing in room six, Julia Thomas’s room.

  It was the corner room, with windows overlooking both the main street through Gold Creek and the rolling desert, their panes clouded and cracked. The room was completely empty, except for another large, battered wardrobe.

  Delilah walked over to the wardrobe, yanking it open, her braid swinging.

  “Anything?” Simon asked.

  “Nope,” she said. “I guess it makes sense that there wouldn’t be anything valuable, you know? Somebody would have found it by now.”

  “Yeah,” Simon agreed, swinging the flashlight in a wide arc, lighting the room’s walls and floor.

  “Wait,” said Henry. “What’s that?”

  On the wall between the two windows that overlooked the desert was a framed picture.

  “It’s another one of those drawings,” Delilah said, following Henry toward the spot where it hung.

  Together, they leaned toward the picture, which appeared to be of a woman. “Simon,” Henry began, “shine the light—”

  But Simon had already directed the flashlight’s beam to the picture.

  Delilah gasped. “Hey! It’s a picture of Julia Thomas, and she’s holding a cat.…”

  Jack ran over to them. “A black cat!” he cried.

  Henry stood frozen, staring at the picture. The paper was frayed and stained, but he could see that it was an ink drawing of Julia Thomas, immediately recognizable, the eerie twin of the librarian, with her wings of dark hair and high cheekbones. She was sitting upright in a high-backed chair. On her lap, inside the curve of her arm, was a black cat.

  A cat with a white splotch on its neck.

  A cat that looked exactly like Josie.

  CHAPTER 6

  NOT ALONE

  “HEY,” JACK SAID. “Doesn’t that cat look like…?” He turned to Henry uncertainly.

  Simon was standing with them now, shining the flashlight directly on the picture, the beam reflecting off the cracked glass. “That’s weird,” he said.

  “It’s Josie,” Henry said quietly. “Look at the mark on her neck.”

  “Of course it isn’t Josie,” Simon snapped. He pulled up the hem of his T-shirt and rubbed the glass. “But it sure does look like her,” he admitted.

  Delilah leaned close to the picture, her brow furrowed. “Even the expression looks like Josie. Do you remember reading anything about Julia Thomas having a cat?” she asked Henry.

  Henry shook his head. “No … but there wasn’t much about Julia Thomas in those books from the library.” He continued to stare at the picture.

  “I don’t think the cat on the hotel sign has a spot on its neck,” Simon said.

  “We just couldn’t see it,” Henry said. “The sign is too faded.”

  “Well, at least this seems like the right room,” Simon said. “Why would they have her picture hanging in here unless she stayed here?”

  “Why would they have her picture hanging here … even if she did stay here?” Henry asked. “It’s not like she was famous or something.”

  “Maybe she was more famous than we thought,” Delilah offered.

  “Or her cat was,” Jack added.

  “Let’s take it with us,” Simon said. “It’s hard to really see it with only the flashlight.”

  Henry bit his lip. “Do you think that’s okay? It’s not ours.”

  But Simon was already lifting the picture carefully off the wall. “It’s not anybody’s now,” he said. “The town was abandoned. It’s the same as people leaving stuff out by the curb for the garbage man.”

  It didn’t quite seem the same as that to Henry. But he was anxious to leave the hotel, so he said nothing as Simon tucked the picture under one arm and swung the flashlight back to the hallway.

  “Let’s have a quick look in the other rooms, then we’ll go,” he said.

  They opened the doors on the other side of the hallway and quickly checked those rooms. There was another old mattress, a broken table, and part of a wooden headboard in one. But the rest were empty, and there were no more pictures on the walls.

  The boys and Delilah carefully descended the stairs and were retracing their steps through the saloon when Henry heard something.

  “Simon, wait,” he said. “Be quiet for a minute.”

  It was a rustling sound, fast and hushed, a steady shifting murmur below their feet.

  Simon turned slowly toward Henry, his eyes wide. “It’s coming from the cellar,” he said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Delilah said, starting past them into the hotel lobby.

  “Stay near the wall,” Simon warned her. He had his flashlight ready, shining the light over the floorboards and into the gaping hole, where the persistent soft scrabbling was growing louder.

  Henry wanted nothing more than to flee into the bright sunshine of the street. But for once, the need to know what was beneath them outpaced his fear. The instinct to look was stronger than the instinct to run.

  With his breath caught in his throat, Henry pressed shoulder to shoulder with Simon, leaning toward the broken edge of blackness, his eyes following the beam of the flashlight.

  “AHHH!” Simon yelped, jumping backward and almost knocking Henry to the floor.

  Down in the cellar, crawling over the pile of sacks in a slithering swarm were rats … a dark moving mound of rats. Their sleek humped backs and long tails blended and separated as they scavenged for crumbs. As the children watched in horror, a sharp nose and bright beady eyes turned upward toward them. The rustling continued, the rats scouring the burlap surface for the last remnants of granola.

  “Ewwww! YUCK!” Jack cried. “Simon, those were down there with you! What if they had bitten you? What if they had gobbled you up?”

  “Shut up, Jack,” Simon said, but his face was pale. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Delilah, who’d been silent, was backing toward the door.

  Simon tossed Henry the flashlight so he could grab the strap of his backpack. They all ran, no longer even bothering to watch where they stepped. In seconds, they were thumping onto the sagging porch, then down the splintered steps. There were the bikes, flashing colorfully in the bright sunlight.

  Simon had the picture of Julia Thomas wedged under his arm. “Try to fit it in my backpack,” he told Henry, sliding the straps over his shoulder and turning around.

  Henry shifted the water bottles. “There’s too much other stuff in here,” he said. “There isn’t room.”

  “Here,” Delilah said, taking the water bottles. “We can put these and the flashlight in my bike basket.” Henry thought, not for the first time, that Delilah was a useful sort of person, especially for a girl. He emptied Simon’s backpack and gently slid the picture inside. Then he pulled the zipper up as far as he could to hold it in place.


  With Henry toting the flashlight, Delilah holding the water bottles, and Jack carrying the granola bars, they clambered onto their bikes.

  “Look,” Jack said as he steered into the dusty street. “There’s a car coming.”

  He pointed down the wagon trail toward the road. Henry shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted into the white summer light. A car had just turned off the road and was heading toward them, its tires churning up great clouds of brown dust.

  “What would a car be doing out here?” he asked.

  “You guys…” Delilah stopped, her brow creased. “That’s a police car.”

  Henry gasped. She was right. Across the top of the car, he could just barely make out the rectangular bar of lights. He turned to her in a panic. “What if it’s Officer Myers?”

  “Let’s go!” Simon said in a low voice. “Not down the path. Come on—behind the building. We’ll have to ride through the field and hope he doesn’t see us.”

  Quickly, they piled the water bottles, flashlight, and granola bars into Delilah’s wicker basket and rolled their bikes around the corner of the hotel and into the desert, all the while watching the police car as it rolled steadily toward them. Simon steered his way through the brush and then climbed onto his bike and started pedaling, forging a trail. They rode behind the water tower and the church. If the rutted path had seemed challenging, the open field of shrubs, cactuses, and boulders was a veritable obstacle course, sandy dirt pushing against the bikes’ tires. Henry realized that Simon was trying to navigate behind a screen of larger bushes and saguaros, but the rough terrain meant he kept having to stop and change direction, struggling to turn his front wheel in the resistant sand. Jack fell off twice, the second time crashing into a large rock. But even he understood the need to keep quiet. Henry felt a pang of sympathy when he saw that the rosy scrape on Jack’s knee was starting to seep blood.

  Meanwhile, they could see the police car rumbling up the dirt trail to the ghost town in a swirling cloud of dust.