Ghosts of Rathburn Park

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Even though Matt was pretty much into letter writing that afternoon he couldn’t help stopping now and then to wonder what was going on about Justin. Whenever he heard footsteps in the hall he peeked out to see who it was and where they were going. During the afternoon Mom went back and forth between the kitchen and Dad’s study and Courtney went back and forth between the TV and the telephone. But Justin only came out of his room once all afternoon and that was just to go down the hall to the bathroom.

  It was turning into a strange day. On the one hand, Matt had an uncomfortable premonition that something really bad was about to happen, but on the other hand, he didn’t know why he thought so. There hadn’t been any clues except for Justin missing church, which could just have been because he wasn’t feeling well.

  When Matt got to the dinner table that evening the first thing he noticed was that when he said hi to Justin, all he got was a dirty look. That wasn’t much of a clue, however, because Justin stopped speaking to him pretty often these days. The only thing that made a difference this time was that Matt usually knew why, or at least could make a pretty good guess. This time he hadn’t a clue.

  He was still trying to remember, what he might have done when he began to realize he wasn’t the only one Justin wasn’t speaking to. All during that Sunday dinner Justin said absolutely nothing to anyone, except when someone asked him if he wanted some more of something, and then he only shook his head, made a grunting noise and went on glaring at his plate. That was when Matt knew for certain that something seriously peculiar was going on. There was nothing the least bit normal about Justin turning down seconds.

  When it was time for family sharing, Justin went on glaring at his plate while Dad called on Matt first and then Courtney. Matt told about how he’d gone to the library and read up on the history of Timber City, and Courtney told about her two new best friends, and which one she liked better than the other one, and why.

  All the time Courtney was talking, and even while he was talking himself, Matt had been worrying about what might happen when it was Justin’s turn. But it turned out to be worse than anything he’d imagined. When Dad started to say, “And now, son, in spite of the dark mood you seem to be in…” Justin jumped up so fast his chair slammed over backward, and without picking it up or saying a word, he stomped out of the room.

  The rest of the family finished their dessert, but Courtney kept rolling her eyes and sighing dramatically. Matt was shocked and very curious. But when he tried to ask Dad what was wrong, Dad would only say that he and Mom had made a decision that Justin didn’t agree with. But later Matt found out more by talking to Courtney.

  “Oh, it was really a horrendous scene,” she said, grabbing Matt and pulling him into her room. After she’d closed the door behind him, she said, “It was about Justin’s friend, Lance. Do you know who Lance is?”

  “Yeah, I know who he is. He’s the one with the eyebrow ring and the spiky hair.”

  Courtney nodded. “Well, I guess somebody told Dad about some trouble that Lance has been in lately. And so Mom and Dad told Justin he couldn’t ride around in Lance’s truck anymore.”

  Matt didn’t even know that Justin had been hanging out with Lance. So he asked, “Where has he been going in Lance’s truck?”

  “Mostly around town, I guess,” Courtney said, “but next weekend there’s going to be this big beach blast and Justin was planning to go to the coast with Lance. And when Dad said he couldn’t because the coast road was too dangerous, there was the most horrible scene.”

  She went on then to tell how she had listened to the whole thing from just outside the door of Dad’s office and she’d heard every word. And she remembered every word too, and repeated all of them for Matt, with so many dramatic special effects and word-for-word quotations that Matt wound up feeling he’d been there too, right outside the office door.

  “And then Dad went,” Courtney said, “‘I know you’re feeling disappointed now, but someday you’ll realize…’ And then Justin went, ‘Someday? Like when I’m too old to give a damn…’”

  Matt winced. “Justin said damn to Dad?” he asked. Ordinarily Gerald Hamilton wasn’t the kind of father a kid would say damn to.

  Courtney nodded. “And a lot of worse words. And when Dad told him he was grounded he went, ‘All right, I’ll go to my room, but I won’t stay there. And the next time Lance asks me to go with him, I’m going and you can’t stop me.’”

  Matt could hardly believe it. Nobody talked to Dad that way. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Courtney went on to quote a bunch of stuff from the argument Mom and Dad had afterward because Mom thought Dad had been too easy on Justin.

  “Mom went, ‘You’ve always let Justin get away with behavior that you condemn in other people’s children.’ And Dad went, ‘That’s not fair, you know that’s not fair.’ And then Mom went…And Dad went…” And on and on and on.

  “It was a horrendous argument.” Courtney’s voice was getting more high-pitched and dramatic with every quote. “I’m so frightened, Matt. I’m sure Mom and Dad are going to get divorced and Justin will get sent to juvenile hall, and who knows what will happen to you and me.” She had been walking around the room as she talked, twisting her face into tragic mask expressions—expressions that she stopped to check on every time she went past a mirror. After the third or fourth trip around the room she threw herself down on her bed and buried her face in her pillow.

  Matt didn’t know what to do, so for a while he didn’t do anything. He tried to remind himself that Courtney had a special talent for tragic drama, but he had to admit he’d never seen, or heard, anything quite like what she was doing at the moment. With her face buried in the pillow and her shoulders shaking violently, she was making a noise that sounded something like a howling coyote. A weird, muffled, quavering sound that rose and fell and rose again.

  What could he do? Matt stood beside Courtney’s bed for quite a while feeling hopeless and pretty helpless, before he suddenly had an idea. He sat down on the edge of the bed and started reciting one of the poems they’d made up when they used to play with Courtney’s animal collection. The game they used to call the Breath of Life.

  In a high-pitched singsong he chanted, “Open your eyes and breathe deep, wake from your enchanted sleep.”

  The howling faded away. Courtney turned over slowly and began to say, “Stamp your hoof and…See. I’ve forgotten what comes next.” She sighed and the tragic quaver was back in her voice as she went on, “That proves it. Forgetting our poems just proves our happy childhood is all over. At least mine is.”

  “Oh come on. You remember.” Matt tried to sound enthusiastic. “The next line was—‘Stamp your hooves and shake your head.’ Don’t you remember? You always were the one who did the unicorn poem.”

  “Oh yes, I do remember now.” Getting up off the bed, Courtney went to the high shelf, took down the spun-glass unicorn, breathed on its head three times and began to whisper, “Open your eyes and…”

  Matt thought it might be a good time to leave. Getting up, he walked quietly to the door. With his hand on the knob, he turned back and said, “Courtney.” He was sorry to interrupt the unicorn poem, but he had to know. “Courtney. How did you make that howling noise?”

  Still holding the unicorn against her lips, Courtney said, “What howling noise? When?”

  “Just now, while you were lying there with your face in the pillow.”

  “I wasn’t making any noise,” she said. “How could I howl with my face in the pillow?” Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Yeah, I remember. I heard something too. I thought you were doing it. Wasn’t it you?”

  Matt shook his head slowly and firmly and, together, they walked across the room to the window. Standing side by side, they stared out past the big oak tree and the picket fence to the beginning of the forest. The sun was almost down and long shadows stretched out across the lawn. Long empty shadows.

  “It sounded like a dog,” Courtney said.

>   Matt felt a shiver run up the back of his neck. “A dog?” he said. “Yeah, I guess that is what it sounded like.”

  The shadows grew longer. A squirrel ran down one side of the oak tree and back up the other. Nothing else happened. Matt went back to his room.

  Fifteen

  A HUGE, ALMOST FULL moon climbed slowly across the sky, turning the lawn to silver and the trees to black velvet silhouettes. On that particular night Matt spent a lot of time keeping track of the moon’s slow, stately progress because dreams kept waking him up. Nightmares, actually, one after another.

  The first nightmare was about being lost in what seemed to be the basement of the Palace or else the lair of some enormous underground monster. Amelia was in the dream and Matt was desperately trying to follow her, but she wouldn’t wait for him. She kept getting farther and farther away and Matt kept stumbling over what seemed to be the bodies of animals. Cold, clammy bodies, covered with bristly fur, that felt and smelled dead, except that some of them squirmed and squealed when he touched them.

  Something was following him. A huge, shapeless blob was getting closer and closer, reaching out to wrap him in long, smothering tentacles. Something wound around his throat and he woke with a start, only to find that the strangling tentacle was the tangled bedsheet and the whole underground horror story had been only a dream.

  And as if that weren’t bad enough, an entirely different nightmare was waiting for him when he finally got back to sleep. This time he was in a courtroom with a judge and jury. There were chains on his hands and feet and the judge was shaking his finger and saying that Matthew Hamilton was guilty of having divorced parents and a brother who was in juvenile hall. Matt was crying and trying to tell the jury that it wasn’t his fault because he hadn’t meant to do it.

  One of the jurors seemed to be a dog, a shaggy dog with sad, brown eyes. Matt could tell that the dog wanted to forgive him, but when it tried to say “not guilty,” the other jurors hit and kicked it until it ran away yelping. Then the judge dragged Matt out of the courtroom and threw him into a tiny, dark room. His arms were flailing, pounding on the walls of the cell—when he woke up.

  He was awake then, but even with both eyes wide open the nightmare hangovers kept flickering through his mind, until at last he got out of bed and went to the window.

  Outside in the fading moonlight, nothing moved. The oak tree’s black velvet leaves hung still and silent, and pale shadows lay limply on the silvery lawn. And beyond the yard the tall, slender pine trees marched away, rank after rank after rank…

  Marching ranks—like an endless file of soldiers. Alexander’s soldiers advancing on the Persian army, or maybe the Greeks. Slipping down off the window seat, Matt lifted the lid, dug out a helmet and, a little farther down, a shield. A helmet and shield he’d made himself out of cardboard and glued-on Velcro and decorated with authentic designs he’d copied from the M volume of the encyclopedia. M for Macedonia.

  Slapping the helmet on his head, he dug deeper, looking for the sword, but he couldn’t find it in the dim light. Where was his Alexander the Great scimitar? He hadn’t used it lately, but it had to be there somewhere—if only it hadn’t been so dark.

  He was on the way back from turning on the light when he happened to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror. A glimpse of Matthew Hamilton, in plaid pajamas, with a pointed helmet on his head and a slightly bent shield strapped to his left arm. He stared for a moment, grinned ruefully and went back to dump the shield and helmet in the window seat. Not this time, he told himself. This time being Alexander the Great wouldn’t solve anything. Not Alexander, or Robin Hood, or even Napoleon.

  Half an hour later he was still on the window seat, wide awake and being tormented by nightmare reruns, when suddenly he tensed, focusing his eyes on… What was it that had moved out there on the lawn? He was sure he’d seen something, some small, shaggy animal, come out of the forest for a moment. Only for a moment and then, just as quickly, fade back out of sight.

  Although he went on staring until his eyes felt dry and stiff, nothing else moved in the shadows at the edge of the trees. After a while he was forced to blink, and then blink again, and at last to let his eyes slowly close. Not to sleep but only to rest them for a moment, only for a moment, but that was when he heard a soft, comforting grumbling, like the sound Shadow used to make when he knew Matt was feeling bad.

  With the friendly growl still echoing in his ears, Matt found his way back to bed and slid into a calm, comforting sleep. And sure enough, the next morning things did seem to be moving in a slightly better direction.

  At breakfast Justin managed a mumbled “Okay” when Mom asked him if he wanted more pancakes, and Courtney had stopped acting like the leading lady in a Greek tragedy. And when Matt asked Dad if he could go for a long ride on his bike all Dad said was “Ask your mother,” which was no surprise. But Mom’s answer, “All right, all right. Run along,” definitely was.

  It all happened so much more quickly than he thought it would that it wasn’t until he was on his way, pedaling toward Rathburn Park, that Matt realized he needed to make some plans. Plans like where he would look for Amelia and what he would do if he found her. The plans hadn’t progressed very far when he turned into the park, got off his bike near the No Trespassing sign and found himself staring at—a famous person. Well, famous in Timber City at least.

  The parking area was just about empty, which was normal for a weekday during working hours, but a car was pulling to a stop on the other side of the lot. A jeep actually, a beat-up, rusty old jeep. And as Matt watched, the door opened and this stranger, who somehow looked vaguely familiar, got out. Matt stared at the tall, red-haired man for a minute or two and then, suddenly, he knew. It was Red Sinclair.

  Matt had never met Mr. Sinclair before, but he’d heard about him and he’d seen his picture at the top of his column in The Timber City Morning Star. He’d even read his whole column a couple of times when it was about something particularly interesting like whale watching or buried treasure. The Red Sinclair column was usually about local people and places and it often mentioned the ancient jeep the writer drove when he went out in the country looking for good story material. So when Matt saw a red-haired man with a big chin getting out of a rusty old jeep, it didn’t take him very long to figure out who it had to be.

  Under ordinary circumstances, Matt might have pedaled right over to say hello. He usually wasn’t all that shy around adults, not even fairly famous ones. And it wasn’t every day that he got to meet a column writer whose picture was in the local newspaper several times a week. But for some reason, maybe because he had been about to do something illegal, like disobeying a No Trespassing sign, he didn’t make the first move. He was starting to get back on his bike when Mr. Sinclair waved and called to him.

  “Hey, kid,” he yelled, and then, “Are you Patrick?”

  Matt walked his bike closer. “No,” he said. “My name’s Matthew Hamilton. I know who you are, though. I read your column.”

  “You do? Good for you. Glad to meet you, Matthew Hamilton.” Red Sinclair shook Matt’s hand. “Even if you aren’t Patrick.”

  Red Sinclair reached into his jeep for some photographer’s stuff before he went on. “Somebody named Patrick e-mailed me yesterday about—well, something he’d seen in the park last weekend. Sounded like an interesting story, so I thought I might check it out.”

  “Here in Rathburn Park?” Matt asked.

  Sinclair nodded. “Yep. Said he’d seen a ghost. And that he wasn’t the only one who saw it. Said he was with some friends and they all saw the same thing.”

  Matt was very interested. “What did it look like?” he blurted out. “It wasn’t a dog, was it?”

  Mr. Sinclair stopped adjusting his camera and grinned at Matt. “A ghost dog?” he asked. “That’s a new angle. Have you heard something about a ghost dog?”

  Matt shook his head. “No, it just occurred to me. I mean, to wonder if there were dog ghosts. Do you
think there are?”

  Mr. Sinclair laughed. “Now, that’s a question I’ve never been asked before. But now that you come to mention it, I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. I’ve known some pretty supernatural canine citizens in my day. But in this case it definitely wasn’t a dog. According to my e-mail informant, it was a woman, or perhaps a girl. A girl dressed in a long white dress and wearing a hat with a heavy veil. He said he and his friends tried to follow her, but she ran away through the forest and then right out across the swamp and got away.”

  Some kind of mental volcano in the back of Matt’s brain began erupting, spewing out a bunch of startling ideas. For a moment he was speechless, except for a silent voice inside his head that kept asking questions he didn’t dare ask out loud. A girl? In a big floppy hat with lots of ribbons and velvet flowers?

  The newspaper columnist finished getting all kinds of equipment slung over his shoulders and stuffed into the pockets of his safari vest and cargo pants before he interrupted Matt’s train of thought. “Let’s see,” he said, pointing to the east. “The graveyard is over this way, isn’t it?”

  “The graveyard? Yes. Over there.” Matt shook his head to clear away visions of a veiled and beribboned hat. “It’s over this way.” Pushing his bike, he led the way toward the graveyard. “Is that where the ghost was?”

  “No. At least I’m not sure. The e-mail just said it was near the park. I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention except an old-timer friend of mine told me a similar story very recently. Told me he’d come out to put flowers on some graves and he saw a girl in a long dress.”