“It’s just, if I don’t get back on time I’ll be grounded, and then it’ll be hard for me to get out of the house again, which would mean I couldn’t help you for a long time.”
The ghost folded his arms. He still didn’t look entirely pleased, but at least the house wasn’t shaking. Spaulding figured that was about the best that could be expected. “Very well,” Mr. Radzinsky said. “But you do agree to our arrangement?”
Spaulding slipped out from under David and backed toward the door quickly. “Well, I’ll try, but—”
Instantly, Mr. Radzinsky reared back and somehow expanded until he was towering over Spaulding. His green glow turned a threatening shade of orange.
Spaulding panicked. Before he knew it, he found himself gabbling, “I agree! I agree! It’s a deal!”
The ghost soundlessly clapped his hands together. “Brilliant! Do hurry back, then, and we’ll settle the details.”
Spaulding dove through the door and into the blessedly ghost-free outdoors.
Behind him, Mr. Radzinsky’s voice echoed faintly, “And I will hold you to your word.”
The door slammed of its own accord, and Spaulding stared back at the silent house. Goose bumps prickled up his arms. What exactly had he just agreed to?
He’d hoped he’d wake up in the morning feeling better. But even by the light of day, he couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Radzinsky and the deal they’d made. What could a ghost need help with? Hopefully not wreaking a terrible vengeance on the living or anything like that. In folklore, revenge always seemed to be a pretty big concern for the dead.
“This is ridiculous,” Spaulding muttered around the fingernail he was chewing as he sat up in bed. “I just won’t go back there. Problem solved! That is, as long as he’s trapped in his house and can’t come here and get me.”
He thought of Mr. Radzinsky’s mood flipping to rage in an instant, his face hollowing into a rotted husk, the walls of the house quaking . . . He shivered. There was no knowing what such a creature might be capable of. Problem possibly not solved.
A sudden stinging in his thumb made him realize he’d chewed the nail down to the quick without noticing. He sighed.
It was time to admit it: he needed help. And there were only two people in the world he could think of who might just possibly believe him.
He picked up his cell phone, took a deep breath, and dialed.
It only rang once before a breathy, fake-accented voice swept over him. “Serena Meriwether speaking. Pray tell me, caller, do you hail from this world, or the astral plane?”
He held back a sigh. The accent meant she was in TV-star-Serena mode, even if there wasn’t a camera around. “Hi, Mom. Doesn’t your phone show who’s calling?”
“Oh, hello, darling! Of course I felt it would be you calling—but one never knows, does one?” Serena said. She sounded distracted. But then, she almost always sounded that way. She tended to multitask.
“Um, no, I guess one doesn’t,” Spaulding said, trying to be agreeable instead of arguing about the likelihood of getting a phone call from the astral plane. “Anyway, could you help me with something, Mom? Something happened last night—”
“Mm-hmm . . . no, no, I said no sugar and extra ice—take that one away, please . . . and how’s school, sweetie? Do you like Thedgeroot? It sounds so quaint.”
“That’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s kind of a weird town, Mom. I think you guys should come check it out.”
Serena laughed. “Oh, sweetie.”
“I’m serious! I really think if you were going to find true paranormal activity anywhere, you’d find it here. There’re some really weird people around, and I think someone might be doing black magic, and—”
“Darling, I know how much you’ve always wanted to be on the show. But it just wouldn’t work out.”
“I’m not trying to get on the show. I don’t want to be on the show! I just hoped you could come help me investigate—”
“I’ve even mentioned it to the producers,” Serena continued over him, “but they say a child character just wouldn’t be a good fit for the show. I’m so sorry, Spuddy.”
Spaulding gritted his teeth. “A child character? You mean, your actual child?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean.” She sighed, a hint of frustration creeping into her voice. “Anyway, this isn’t coming from me, it’s those awful producers. They think your character—sorry, you—would be a bit too, well . . . boring. We’d lose viewers.”
“They said that?”
“Actually, they said boring and weird. But not in a bad way! It’s just not good for TV.”
“Boring and—that’s ridiculous!” he sputtered. “They’ve only ever met me once. What do they know?”
“You have to admit, when you came to visit you didn’t make the best impression. All you brought with you were textbooks and a teddy bear. Not even a change of clothes. It did make you seem a trifle odd.”
“I was only eight! Aunt Gwen should’ve helped me pack. And those were books on the paranormal so I could help you with research.”
“That’s beside the point anyway, darling.” Serena dropped her voice to a mysterious whisper. “You know why we can’t have you live with us—the dark entities we confront are far too dangerous to expose you to.”
“You haven’t confronted a dark entity once,” Spaulding burst out. He knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere by getting upset, but she was so infuriating. “It’s all camera tricks. The show’s ridiculous, if you want to know the truth—I’d never be on it even if you begged me!”
“Spaulding, really! I know you’re angry, but you know better than to make light of what we do. Skepticism invites demons in. Touch wood and turn clockwise three times right this instant.”
“Ugh!” He held the phone away from his ear and glared at it. “I’m turning counterclockwise, Mother, even as we speak.”
Serena sighed loudly. “You’re being very childish, Spaulding.”
He scowled. For once, she was saying something true. With an effort, he pulled himself together. “Look, I called about something important, if you’d just listen. Do you know what I did last night? I talked to a ghost! How’s that for boring, huh?”
There was a long silence. Finally, Serena spoke very quietly. “Spudling, sweetheart. We’ve been over this before. You mustn’t try to get attention this way. Remember when you thought you’d recorded a banshee wailing?”
Heat swept over his face. Of course she had to bring that up. “That was different—I was just a little kid. This time—”
“It turned out to be Aunt Gwen’s snoring echoing through an air vent in your room. Our team spent a lot of time analyzing that recording, and it was all a waste. Not a scrap of material we could use on the show. And thank goodness we realized before it aired! We’d have been laughingstocks.”
“But this time—”
She cut him off. “I’m so sorry, darling, but I just don’t have time to chat anymore right now. We’re ready to start taping. I’ll call tonight, all right? No more fibs. Good-bye, sweetie, kiss ki—”
Spaulding ended the call. His face was burning—he wasn’t sure if it was more from anger or embarrassment. He should never have called. He’d known they’d never consider coming to Thedgeroot to help him.
But even expecting a no, he hadn’t expected to be humiliated.
Spaulding gave serious consideration to never getting out of bed again, but eventually his stomach started to growl. Maybe he’d feel better after a nice, relaxing breakfast over the morning paper.
Downstairs, he made cinnamon toast, sat down at the kitchen table, and started leafing through the newspaper. But then a small article buried in the second section caught his eye, and breakfast suddenly got a lot less relaxing.
“Ew,” he mumbled through a mouthful of toast. Then it hit him. Disturbed graves. The man in the suit.
What if Spaulding hadn’t been crazy to think he was dead? What if graves w
ere being disturbed . . . by the dead themselves?
If he was right, then the police were way off base with their investigation. They should be looking for someone doing black magic to raise the dead, not some ring of regular crooks robbing graves—
He laid the paper down and stared into space as another realization sank in: he had the pieces he needed to solve all his problems. He just had to put them together right.
Sure, he was stuck in a town where something paranormal and possibly dangerous was going on. And yes, everyone he knew thought he was either crazy or weird, including his own parents. But the truth was he, and he alone, had met a real ghost and knew that the living dead stalked the streets of Thedgeroot.
All he had to do was prove it.
After that, everyone would realize he wasn’t weird at all. Katrina would think he was cool and interesting; Marietta wouldn’t be embarrassed to talk to him in public. His parents would be forced to admit he was a better paranormal investigator than they’d ever be. They’d be begging him to live with them.
The first step would be to track down the man in the suit. If he was just some homeless guy, he was probably camped out somewhere by the pond, and Spaulding would know his theory was wrong.
But if he was a reanimated corpse . . . well, Spaulding would be ready to snap a picture and score his first piece of solid proof.
The trail where Spaulding had last seen the man in the suit wasn’t hard to find again. The woods around it were tangled and dark, and the dirt path stood out clearly; everywhere else the undergrowth was too thick to pass through.
In a muddy spot a few feet down the trail, prints from a narrow, smooth-soled shoe were visible. Spaulding was no expert on tracking, but they seemed like the kind of shoe an old guy would wear with a nice suit. It seemed that if he wanted to track down the man in the suit, he was going to have to follow that path into the woods.
Spaulding hesitated. Why was it that everything around Thedgeroot seemed to happen in the woods? Couldn’t just one single mysterious event happen in a nice, well-lit, populated area in the middle of town?
“Hey!”
Spaulding spun around to see Lucy Bellwood speeding toward him on her bike like an oncoming train. Coming up behind him and shouting “Hey!” seemed to be turning into a regular hobby for her.
He smoothed his hair and tried to arrange his face into a calm, cool expression, like someone who had definitely not just been startled out of his skin.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Lucy panted as she screeched to a halt inches short of smashing into him.
“By which she means, we saw you riding out here and she insisted on following you,” said Marietta, pulling up behind her sister.
Lucy’s cheeks reddened. “Shut up, Marietta.”
“You shut up, Ludwig!”
Spaulding raised an eyebrow. “Ludwig?”
Lucy heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, she finds it incredibly funny to call me Ludwig, because I play the piano—Ludwig van Beethoven, you know?”
He nodded, impressed. “Good nickname. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here.” He smiled at her. She turned even redder. “I was just doing some research. Maybe you two could help.”
“Research?” Marietta narrowed her eyes. “Is this about that guy you thought was a zombie?”
“A zombie?” Lucy gasped. “Here? What? Where?” She swiveled her head frantically, as if she wasn’t sure whether to run for her life or get an autograph.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Spaulding said quickly. “I never said anything about zombies.” He folded his arms and tried to look dignified. If only he hadn’t picked today to wear his Ghostbusters T-shirt—Marietta would probably start telling everyone he thought the movie was a documentary. “He was a revenant, if anything.”
Lucy’s face fell. “Like a church guy?”
“Not a reverend, doofus—revenant,” Marietta said. “But it means the same thing. You just don’t want to admit you’re talking about zombies,” she said to Spaulding.
Spaulding scowled. “There’s a difference. I don’t mean there’s some kind of rage virus or something making dead people wander around eating brains. That’s crazy. I just think someone might be using black magic to raise the dead.”
She rolled her eyes. “Huge difference. Got it. So you’re out here looking for zom—sorry, revenants?”
Spaulding decided now would be a good time to practice not telling everyone everything all the time. “I’m simply following this trail to see where it goes.”
Lucy bounced on her bicycle seat eagerly. “I can help! I know my way all around here.” She raced past him to lead the way down the path. “Marietta and I used to explore the woods all the time, back when we were investigating the secrets of Thedgeroot.”
Marietta looked mortified. “Shut up, Ludwig!” she snapped, pedaling after her quickly.
The narrow path sloped gradually upward into the hills. Eventually, it connected with a dirt road, just wide enough for a single vehicle. Fresh tire tracks crisscrossed in the mud. The smooth-soled shoeprints showed up again too, but so did lots of other footprints. Any of them could be from the man in the suit, or none of them. It seemed to be an awfully well-used road for a dirt track in the middle of nowhere.
Lucy stopped at the edge of the road. “Which way do you wanna go? That way’s a shortcut back to town.”
“Hmm.” He looked down the road the way she pointed, then peered at the ground. In the muddle of footprints, a single smooth-soled shoeprint showed clearly, heading the opposite direction. “What if you go the other way?”
Lucy shrugged. “Not much. If you go for a really long ways you get to the old mine, but there’s nothing there now except some filled-in tunnels. There’s no way in—we’ve looked. The only other thing out there is the factory.”
Spaulding straightened up fast. “The factory?”
“Yeah. The road doesn’t go too close, but you can see it.”
The man in the suit had been headed toward the factory? Now that was worth investigating. Spaulding jumped back onto his bike. “Let’s go.”
Marietta mumbled something under her breath about a colossal waste of time, but Lucy and Spaulding ignored her.
As the dirt road took them deeper into the woods, it quickly became steep and narrow. Spaulding began to pant. Stupid man in the suit. Couldn’t he just stay in town where everything was all paved and civilized?
“How . . . much . . . farther?” he gasped at Lucy.
She skidded to a halt. “No farther,” she said, not even a little winded. “Look!”
He raised his head. Up ahead, the trees thinned abruptly. While he’d been focused on trying not to have a heart attack, they had come out of the hills to the edge of a valley.
A few hundred yards away stood the factory behind its high fence. The smokestacks weren’t smoking now, if they ever had been. The way the lowering clouds were billowing over the tops of the stacks made him wonder if it might have just been fog the other time, too.
“Wow, look at that.” Marietta ambled over and folded her arms. “Why, it’s big and cement and gray. I am sooo glad we came out here to look closer.”
Spaulding scowled. It didn’t seem too promising, he had to admit.
He hadn’t expected a big sign saying EVIL DELIVERY ENTRANCE HERE or anything, but some sort of discovery would have been nice. Especially with other people standing there expectantly, looking all smirky and superior (Marietta) or crushingly disappointed (Lucy).
He gave the fence a half-hearted rattle. The chain link was probably climbable, but the curls of razor wire along the top didn’t look very inviting. Marietta followed him through the long grass and leaned on the fence a few feet away.
“You’ve never been in there with your dad or anything?” he asked.
“Nope. It’s been closed as long as I can remember.”
“What did they make out here in the old days?”
“Well, first it was a refinery, back when the Von Sle
chts owned a big gold mine. Then the mines shut down—they’d gone so deep it was too expensive to get the gold out. They switched over to manufacturing stuff until old Mr. Von Slecht died and his son decided to close the factory.”
Spaulding kicked the fence, only half-listening. What a bust. He’d been sure if he got near the place there’d be some clue or—
A scream ripped through the silence.
Spaulding and Marietta spun around, scanning the woods and fields. Nothing moved.
“Wait,” Marietta gasped. “Where’s Lucy?”
Spaulding was sure she’d been right behind them when they’d walked up to the fence, but there was no sign of her now. Her bike lay in the road with theirs, abandoned.
“Maybe she went farther into the woods,” he said. They stared across the road at the shadowy trees.
“You go first,” Marietta said.
“She’s your sister,” Spaulding said.
Luckily, before the ethical debate got heated, they heard the slap-slap of running feet. Lucy appeared around a bend in the road. She tripped over the bikes and went sprawling in the dirt as Spaulding and Marietta raced up to her.
“Are you okay, Lud?” Marietta knelt beside her and patted Lucy’s back. “Are you hurt?”
Lucy looked up, eyes huge and hair full of twigs and leaves. “There’s a dead guy back there!”
Marietta switched gears instantly from concern to annoyance. “That’s what all the screeching was about? Some stupid thing you imagined? You had me really worried!” She hauled Lucy to her feet and dusted her off with a few violent swats. Then she wheeled on Spaulding. “See what you’ve done? You’ve warped her little brain with all your dead people talk.”
Spaulding grabbed Lucy’s shoulder. “I believe you, Lucy. Quick, show me where you saw it.”
Lucy nodded eagerly and trotted off the way she’d come. Spaulding followed, dragging Marietta along by the sleeve.
They rounded the bend in the road. Lucy pointed toward a shallow ditch across the way, where brambles and weeds grew in a dense tangle. There was something else there too, something dark and lumpy. It blended in so well, it was no wonder they’d ridden past it without noticing before.
The Haunted Serpent Page 4
