by Andrew Nance
We explained why we had to hurry, and also why we were covered in goop.
“Hmmm, ectoplasm is my guess.” Ian Tremblin told us that when Millie had read Lucinda’s story, he felt a presence beside him, and the next thing he knew, he was wandering around in the basement. He realized that Daemon Hall had once again slipped into him, and a fight started for possession of his body and soul. He described how the battle with Daemon Hall raged until he literally pummeled himself with punches and blows.
“I didn’t think I could win.” His voice was tremulous.
“How did you beat it?” Demarius asked.
“I’m not sure it was me. You see, everything began to shake, like an earthquake.”
“When Oaskaguakw came through the floor,” Millie said.
“Minutes later, Daemon Hall left me.”
“I bet that was the exact moment the arrow pierced the book,” I said.
Demarius scrutinized his face. “You sure kicked your own ass, Mr. Tremblin.”
“That I did, Demarius.” He reached up and gingerly touched his chin. “That I did.”
We started down the stairs for the second floor, and I actually felt hopeful that we’d all leave in one piece.
Lucinda motioned Millie and me over and took us into her confidence. “I’m worried about Scungilli. He’s in a bad way, and I’m not talking about his ankle. I don’t remember what happened in Daemon’s study. Matt does. He says Rudolph Daemon spoke to him.”
“Daemon got hanged before the door closed,” I said.
Lucinda nodded. “He died, then spoke to Matt. That’s why he’s freaked.”
“What’d Daemon say?”
“He won’t talk about it.”
Millie sniffed a couple of times, then Lucinda. We smelled smoke.
“It’s too late,” Matt said, his voice flat.
“No way. Demarius and I made it through this fire already.”
“Damn right,” Demarius said from beside him. “And we can do it again.”
We rushed down to the second-floor landing, where my bravado deflated like a burst balloon. Orange, red, and yellow hues glowed within a rolling sea of smoke so thick that the entrance hall was no longer visible. The crackling sound of fire echoed as the heavy smoke crept up the staircase like rapidly rising fog.
“The floor’s hot.” I could feel it, even through my shoes. “We’ll never get to the front door.”
“We’re going to die,” Matt wailed.
“Back!” Ian Tremblin pointed deeper into the house. “That way!”
They started down the hallway, but I stayed. Something nagged at me.
“Wade, now!” the writer ordered.
“Wait.” I looked down at the book in my hands. I had a feeling, an intuition, that I needed to piece together. “All this started when we told stories around this.” Coughing, I held up the book.
Millie dropped the bow, ran to me, and tried pulling me along. “Wade, the smoke.”
“It traveled with us from Mr. Tremblin’s house to here.”
Ian Tremblin shouted, “Wade, I don’t see—”
I cut him off. “You’re the one who said that books transport readers.”
“Books do what?” he said, then fell into a fit of coughs.
“The tree and the monsters disappeared when Millie shot the book. Why? She hurt it, wounded it.”
“Wade, come on!”
“This is what’s been consistent from the start! The book has been making all this happen, like some sort of evil battery powering it all!”
Ian Tremblin stepped toward me, his eyes glued to the Book of Daemon Hall. “A potent talisman?”
I held it over my head like a hellfire preacher with a Bible. “Back in his library you said that books and stories take readers to other places and times. It’s usually in their heads, but the Book of Daemon Hall did it for real.”
The writer put a hand on my shoulder and nodded. “I never thought I’d encourage a book burning, but do it, Wade.”
Flames danced through the smoke. The heat was intense. Ignoring the yellow smoke engulfing my feet, I hurried to the top step and hurled the book toward the inferno. As the book fell, the paper airplane I’d made from one of its pages slid out, caught an updraft from the fire, and flew out over the entrance hall.
“Now we can go!”
The roar of the firestorm was earsplitting as we ran down the second-floor hallway. Breathing smoke was painful, and it felt like we were running on a stovetop. Ian Tremblin led us, Demarius and Lucinda rushed Matt along, and I pushed from the rear. Everyone vanished in a firestorm as the floor collapsed. We fell screaming into the inferno below—
—and crashed onto the floor back in the library at Tremblin’s Lair. We sat up, gazing dumbly at one another as smoke rose from our clothes.
Demarius beat at sparks in his dreadlocks and laughed. “We—we made it.”
“We all got out. Even me,” Matt said, disbelieving.
Smiling, Lucinda climbed into a chair, several inches of hair singed away.
Millie and I stood and hugged. “No one died.” I turned to Ian Tremblin. “No one.”
He sat up, grinning like crazy, and balled his hand into a fist. “We beat Daemon Hall, Wade. We beat it.”
Epilogue
It’s cold enough that we see our breath as we stand next to each other, gloved hand in gloved hand. Millie reaches up to touch the place where her necklace rests under her jacket and shirt. I do the same. We didn’t plan it, but for Christmas I gave her a necklace, a red stone mounted in silver. She gave me a blue stone necklace. It seemed proof that we should be together.
Millie was a big help when it came to my parents. I didn’t tell them about the Book of Daemon Hall. This was kind of risky, as my mom is expert at detecting secrets. But when I told her I’d met someone, she totally focused on that. She and Millie get along great. Millie really clinched it when she called my mom on Christmas Eve and asked if she could go to Christmas mass with my family.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“I’m fine. It’s only a cold.” When I picked her up, she had told me she might be coming down with something. I’d offered to postpone our date to another night, but she insisted on coming. “In fact, I’d lay a big ol’ liplock on you, but I don’t want to give you my germs.”
I turn her so that she folds into my arms, and kiss her.
She leans her head against my shoulder. “If you get sick, don’t blame me.”
“Typhoid Millie. Now, there’s a pen name for you. Speaking of which, did you decide what you’ll write about?”
Ian Tremblin had announced that he’d hold no more contests and proclaimed everyone a winner. Millie, Matt, and Lucinda would each pen a novella, longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. Tremblin would edit them, and they would be published in a book as part of his Macabre Master series, just like mine.
“I think I’ll write more about Little Fox’s adventures.” We’re quiet awhile, and then she says, “Lucinda called a couple of days ago.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s strong, you know—says she’s fine. Oh, and Matt had called her. He and Ian Tremblin are e-mailing and IMing each other. They’re still debating whether we went back in time or whether Daemon Hall was showing its memories.”
I laughed, picturing both of them furiously typing their arguments.
“Who do you think is right?”
“Both … neither. It’s something we can’t explain.”
We turn our attention to the mansion on the other side of the fence. It’s not a full moon, but big enough that we can see Daemon Hall pretty well. “Millie, I sort of understand why you wanted to come here, but why at night?”
“I want to see it at its scariest. I need to face it so I can face my fear. Maybe it’ll end my nightmares.”
I’ve had nightmares, too, but I don’t mention the voice that comes when I sleep, saying things I can’t quite remember.
“What’s th
at?” Millie’s looking toward the mansion.
“Where?”
“Over there, see?” She points up to one of the third-floor windows, to something in the air. “Is it a bird?”
We watch it approach, soaring to the right, gliding to the left. When it gets close enough to recognize, my heart feels like it’s squeezed in a vise. I hear an intake of breath from Millie as she, too, identifies it. Neither of us speaks as the paper airplane I made from a page of the Book of Daemon Hall sails closer, finally landing at our feet.
With a shaking hand, I reach for the plane. Millie grabs my arm, and I pause to look at her; her face is white and her eyes wide. She shakes her head, but I pick it up anyway. Just touching the paper makes my stomach roll. We get back into my brother’s VW. I start the engine and mess with the heater, then turn on the dome light.
Millie touches my arm. “How?”
I shrug. When it comes to Daemon Hall, I’ve stopped asking questions.
“Should we unfold it?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Opening it carefully, I hold it against the dashboard. At the top is the same pen-and-ink drawing of the skull and crossed pens that headed the table of contents in the Book of Daemon Hall. “Remember when I pulled the arrow out of the book and this page came out?”
She nodded. “We never looked at it, did we?”
“I thought it was another blank page.” It isn’t. Little boxes and rectangles are drawn all over it. “What do you think it means?”
Millie shakes her head.
I look closer and see tiny squiggles.
“Hang on.” I get out, open the trunk, and start rooting around the assortment of junk my brother has stuffed in there over the years, looking for an old magnifying glass I’d come across a couple of months earlier. I find it, return to the driver’s seat, and hold the glass over the paper.
“Is that writing?” she asks.
“Yeah.” In each square are handwritten words. I squint hard. “I think it’s a map of Daemon Hall. See, in that first big rectangle it says ‘Entrance Hall.’ And, look, there’s the dining room, first-floor library, and so on.”
“Wait a minute, Wade.” She points about halfway down the front page. “Daemon Hall is only so big, right? But the rooms continue all the way to the bottom of the map. It’s not that big.”
“Weird.” I look closely, then flip the map over and see there are hundreds, maybe thousands, more rooms, halls, wings, and annexes that don’t exist. “Daemon Hall would have to be as big as a whole town or city for all of that.”
I hunch over the magnifying glass and look at several nonexistent rooms. “This just gets stranger.”
“What?”
“Instead of saying what the rooms are, they have names, dates, and times printed next to them. Here’s one room: The name written there is Oliver Snelling. It also says June 2, 1952, and 3:13 A.M.”
“Could that be someone who was lost or killed in Daemon Hall on that date and at that time?”
“Maybe.” I scan some more of the squares. “Wait, no, because the dates don’t all fit. Check this one out, Emily Packard, September 18, 1798, 10:11 P.M. That’s over a hundred years before Daemon Hall was built.”
Millie takes the magnifying glass and holds it over the middle of the parchment. “Is that a tower?”
“Looks like the kind of thing Rapunzel was imprisoned in, huh? But why draw the actual tower?” All the other rooms are drawn as squares, like they’re being viewed from above, but the tower is complete as if seen from the side.
Millie takes the magnifier and leans close. “Gross.”
“What?”
She points at the top of the tower and hands me the magnifying glass. “It’s a heart.”
Not the Valentine’s Day variety, but the kind that looks freshly ripped from someone’s chest. I point to more writing and whisper, “The heart of Daemon Hall.”
“Can we—should we try and figure out what the map is for?”
“I don’t know. Part of me wants to. The other part says we should leave it alone, that it’ll only lead to trouble.”
Millie looks at me. “All those names, those people, what if they’re imprisoned by Daemon Hall, or their souls are, like your friend Chelsea was?”
“What can we do? We nearly died in there.”
She nods, then coughs.
“Maybe I should send it to Mr. Tremblin. He’s good at figuring out stuff like this. What do you think?”
Millie doesn’t answer, instead she grasps my arm. Her face is pale, almost white. She swallows repeatedly.
“Are you all right?”
She shakes her head. “All of a sudden I feel awful.”
“I’ll take you home.”
Her face is flushed pink. I touch her cheek and she’s burning with fever. I turn off the dome light and reach for the keys dangling in the ignition as my cell phone rings. I answer, intending to tell whoever it is I’ll call back later.
“Hey, I’ll have to get back—”
“It wasn’t ectoplasm,” someone shouts.
“What?”
“We made a mistake!”
I recognize the voice. “Matt?”
“We’re in big trouble. You didn’t figure it out,” he says accusingly, then admits, “I missed it too.”
“Slow down and tell me what’s wrong.” I look at Millie. She has her head back and eyes closed. She’s shivering.
“Ian Tremblin is in a coma!”
“What?”
“We were instant messaging, arguing our Daemon Hall time theories, and he just stopped. I called and Mrs. Rathbone told me.”
“Told you what?”
“I tried getting in touch with Lucinda to tell her.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Her parents told me she’s in the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“She’s real sick, high fever, and they don’t know what it is.”
A chill starts at the top of my head and runs in waves down my body.
“Demarius?”
“His mom said he can’t come to the phone because he’s sick in bed!” Matt is close to tears. “And I’m not feeling so good myself.”
“The tree—the ectoplasm,” I mutter.
“We’re screwed. It was the same stuff that sprayed the construction workers when they cut down the tree, the ones who got sick and slipped into comas. Remember them? Their spines snapped, and they died. That’s going to be us! It got on you and Millie, and then we found you guys and everybody hugged, spreading it all around.”
I want to shout at Matt, tell him he’s wrong.
He starts crying. “Want to know what Rudolph Daemon said to me in his study? Remember that? I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“What did—” The question catches in my throat.
“Lucinda and I couldn’t do anything when Daemon was hanged. We watched until he quit kicking. Then something happened—Lucinda froze, stood there without moving. I screamed at her, but she wouldn’t snap out of it. I looked up. Even though he was dead, Rudolph Daemon, noose around his neck, looked down. I could tell he felt sorry for me. That’s funny, isn’t it? He’s hanging by the neck, and he feels sorry for me. Then he said, ‘You’ll return, Matthew. Even if you’re dead.’”
The phone slips from my hand. “Millie?” She’s panting hard. I shake her shoulder and shout, “Millie!”
I start the car. Twisting the wheel, I speed up the dirt road. My head pounds, and my back aches. In fact, I ache all over. I put the back of my hand to my forehead. Too hot. We need to get to the hospital fast.
I glance in the rearview mirror as we race from Daemon Hall. There are red lights in two of the third-floor windows. In between them and a floor down, a single window glows red. The same shade of light flares through the double-door entrance. Daemon Hall, at that moment, resembles a skull.
And now I remember what that voice says, the one that comes in my nightmares. Like Rudolph Daemon said to Matt, the voice in
my dreams says, “You’ll return to Daemon Hall. Alive or dead, you’ll be back.”
What reviewers said about
DAEMON HALL
“Readers will get chills imagining the terrors that can exist after dark. Nance crafts a compelling novel by giving insight into each character’s fears as well as bringing the reader a dose of death, demons, and the paranormal.”
—Voya
“Nance offers a smoothly written, clever framework for relaying ten scary stories, and horror fans will appreciate classic elements like the spooky house that seems to be alive, the evocation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and the one guest who must be left behind.… These tales are enjoyably creepy and straight-up fright-night fun.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“Readers looking for creepy chills and thrills will find plenty of satisfaction in this fast-paced book.”
—Booklist
“The stories in this gripping page-turner, as well as the drama of the frightened teens dropping out one by one, will keep readers on the edge of their seats.”
—School Library Journal
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Text copyright © 2011 by Andrew Nance
Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Coleman Polhemus
All rights reserved.
This poem reprinted by permission from
Arnold Lobel, Whiskers and Rhymes, © 1985,
Harper Collins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nance, Andrew.
Return to Daemon Hall : evil roots / Andrew Nance ; with illustrations by Coleman Polhemus. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“Christy Ottaviano books.”
Summary: Wade and Demarius go to author Ian Tremblin’s home as judges of the second writing contest but soon are mysteriously transported to Daemon Hall, where they and the three finalists must tell—and act out—the stories each has written.
ISBN 978-0-8050-8748-2 (hc)
