“I guess we probably should have mentioned that, along with totally being able to handle ourselves … we’re also totally trapped in this room,” Tweed said dryly.
“Right.” Pilot gritted his teeth. “Yeah … that might’ve been useful to know.”
He walked over to the door and tried the handle. Then he walked out onto the balcony and looked down. Then he looked up. Then he walked back into the room, sat down in the leather chair Feedback had recently vacated, turned his hat around backward like he always did when he needed to concentrate and sighed deeply. The pilot’s wings pinned to his hat glinted in the moonlight coming in through the window.
When Ramshackle, seeming to sense that the newcomer to the situation needed a bit of consoling, came out from where he was crouched in the shadows under the desk and rubbed against Pilot’s leg, Pilot absent-mindedly reached down to give what he thought was a house cat a head skritch.
The others watched him silently for a moment.
Cheryl bit her lip to keep from giggle-snorting as Pilot’s fingers registered the presence of stubby little horns on the ‘kitty.’ His hand froze. His eyes went wide.
Ramshackle made an enquiring “Mrrr?” and ruffled his wings.
“WHOA!!” Pilot leaped from the chair and backed into the middle of the room.
“He likes you!” Artie grinned.
“Is that …?”
“A gargoyle?” Cheryl finished Pilot’s question for him. “Yeah. You might just wanna roll with this one, Flyboy.”
“MRrrwff?” Ramshackle tilted his head.
“He says he likes your wings,” Artie said. When Ramshackle issued forth another little burble of noise, he turned to him and nodded. “Yup, he flies, too. Just like you. Except he has to use a plane.”
“Um, Artie?” Tweed raised an eyebrow. “You do realize that you’re talking to a gargoyle, right?”
“What?” He blinked. “Oh! Huh. How ’bout that. I guess my supernatural translating powers are still in good working order! That Zahara-Safiya was a real peach!”
“Do I even want to know what he’s talking about?” Feedback asked warily.
“Artie got himself cursed by an ancient Egyptian mummy princess named Zahara-Safiya a while back and she made him her minion translator.” Cheryl shrugged. “So, in answer to your question, no. Probably not.”
“That’s what I thought,” Feedback murmured.
“Okay, look,” Pilot said. “This is serious. We’re trapped in here. Now, I know C and T here are flying out of radar range. And I didn’t say anything to anyone ’cause I didn’t want them getting in heck. So, Karl … did you tell your parents about coming out to this crazy contest in the middle of nowhere?”
“Heck, no.” Feedback shook his head. “I mean, they probably wouldn’t have cared, but I figured, why take the risk? I just snuck out of my room after dinner.”
Pilot sighed deeply. “So … nobody other than us knows we’re here.”
“I know,” Artie said.
“Yeah,” Tweed said, “but you’re here.”
“So?”
“Did you tell anyone else you were coming here?” Cheryl asked hopefully.
“Heck, yes I did!” Artie exclaimed, looking exceptionally proud of himself.
The twins exchanged a glance. Maybe they weren’t doomed after all. Maybe someone would come looking for them …
“Who exactly did you tell, Art-Bart?” Pilot asked.
“I told you!”
“And where am I?”
“Don’t be dumb, Armbruster!” Artie snorted. “You’re right here!”
“Yup. I am.”
“And I … oh.” Artie’s snort turned into something of a nervous coughing fit.
An uncomfortable silence descended as the lot of them looked back and forth at each other wondering just what the heck they were supposed to do now. Then Feedback’s head snapped up and his expression brightened right up. For a second, the girls thought that maybe he’d thought of a way out of their predicament, but that wasn’t it.
“Super cool!” he exclaimed, pointing to the pile of gear Tweed had emptied out of her knapsack to get to her Nerf bow. “What is that?”
Apparently, where the tech-prodigy babysitter was concerned, all heebie-jeebies and life-and-limb concerns were automatically put on hold in the face of unfamiliar technology. In this case, a Drive-In speaker.
Cheryl nudged Simon with the toe of her sneaker. “That’s … kind of hard to explain,” she said. “His name is Simon. He’s—”
“He’s awesome!” Feedback enthused, crossing the room with a bounce in his step to get a closer look. “This metal housing is totally retro tech! It’s got, like, a steampunk vibe!”
“Help!” Simon exclaimed as Feedback picked him up and started to turn him over and over, juggling him from hand to hand and examining him with a critical eye. “Unhand me! I’m prone to motion sickness!”
“That’s hilarious!” Feedback held the speaker up to his eye and peered through the grate, trying to see inside. “You hid a wireless receiver in it? Is it digital?” He spun the speaker around again and squinted at the wire opening.
“How rude!” Simon squawked.
Artie snorted with laughter.
“Radical!” Feedback’s grin widened and he flipped the speaker over to peer at its backside. “Who’s operating the transmitter?”
“Uh, Simon is,” Cheryl said and plucked the speaker from Feedback’s clever fingers before the disembodied spirit of the deceased mystic began to make spectral barfing noises. “He’s kind of … transmitting from the beyond, I guess.”
“Beyond … huh?” Feedback’s cheery grin faltered. “You mean it’s not digital?”
“Definitely not,” Tweed said.
She and Cheryl exchanged glances. Should we? they wondered.
The last thing they wanted to do was spill the beans about Simon Omar. But it was starting to look like they didn’t have much choice. And, after all, they were already hip-deep into sharing a paranormal experience with the other sitter, anyway. The gargoyle prowling the perimeter of the haunted room was more than enough proof of that.
Also? Pilot was silently staring at them, waiting for an explanation.
“Told you,” Cheryl muttered at him, recalling how he hadn’t believed them earlier when they’d shown him the speaker back at C+T headquarters.
“When Cheryl says ‘beyond,’” Tweed said, “she really means ‘beyond.’ Like, ‘afterlife’ kind of beyond.”
“Oh, not again!” Pilot threw his hands in the air.
Feedback started to blink rapidly, as if his brain was frantically trying to process information input that simply did not compute. “Wait. Is this like the flying bat-cat thing?” He glanced warily at the gargoyle who sat scratching at one ragged ear with its sharp-taloned back foot.
“No, no, no,” Tweed said with an air of authority on the subject. “Well, yes. Sort of. It’s technical. I mean, the speaker is definitely possessed. But that’s only because we opened up the trans-dimensional portal for the ancient Egyptian mummy princess we told you about to cross over into her afterlife. You see, the mystical shockwave seems to have activated the dormant spectrally enhanced personality of a kablooied mystical magician guy from the turn of the century named Simon Omar, whose spirit force was already trapped in a jewel on display in the curiosities tent at that carnival that rolled in and out of town last week. There’s a fine distinction between possession and haunting. But it generally takes a supernatural connoisseur to distinguish between the two.”
“Okaaaay …” Feedback resumed edging toward the door. “I’ma gonna try and gedoutta here again …”
“Good luck with that.” Cheryl threw a jaunty wave in his direction. “I don’t think any of us is going anywhere until the house decides it wants to let us.”
Feedback stopped edging as he seemed to realize that the girls really did know what they were talking about, and that he was stuck in a situation that was
weirder than anything he’d ever encountered. The only thing to do was not panic.
“Okay,” he said, taking a deep, calming breath. “All right. One step at a time, right? Just like a video game. One level at a time. It’s just a puzzle, right? If only we could figure out how to get out of this room … then together maybe we could work to figure out the lock on the front door,” he said. “There’s a keyhole but I couldn’t find a key. I worked at it for almost ten minutes with my handy-dandy battery-powered pocket screwdriver but I couldn’t get that big bronze doorknob to budge—”
“Doorknob!” Simon piped up suddenly, startling them all and making Cheryl fumble and almost drop him. “Right! I knew there was something I was forgetting!”
“What’s that?” Tweed asked.
“So, you know this house is haunted, right?” Simon asked smugly, as if he hadn’t been paying attention to a thing they’d said and just assumed they didn’t know that at all.
“Well, duh.” Cheryl rolled an eye at the speaker. “That was kind of the conclusion we came to, yeah.”
“Oh.” He sounded a bit deflated, like they’d beat him to the punchline of a joke he was telling.
“Okay, okay,” Cheryl relented. “I’ll bite. What do you know about this house and the specifics of the spookificationing thereof, Speakie?”
“Well, it’s not so much about the house. It’s more about the doorknob of the house, really.” Simon’s voice brightened up considerably. “You know. Seeing as how it was part of Dudley’s World-O-Wonders curiosities exhibit and all.”
“What?” Cheryl’s expression darkened at the mere mention of that charlatan Colonel Dudley and his travelling sham-show. She opened her mouth to express her opinion in impolite terms but Tweed silenced her with a raised hand.
“Go on,” she encouraged the speaker.
“Right,” Simon Omar continued. “Well. The thing’s been sitting in a glass case right next to my turban jewel for years!”
“The Spirit Stone of Simon Omar?” Tweed raised an eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not!” Simon protested. “That big old bronze knob was found in the ruins of a manor house in Yorkshire, England, that once belonged to some rich old nutcase.”
“Ruins?” Tweed asked.
“Yup,” the speaker said. “Much like yours truly, that house blew itself to smithereens!”
“What happened?” Feedback asked.
“Couldn’t say,” Simon said with a vocal shrug. “I only caught bits and pieces of the story by way of carnival-attendee chatter.”
Cheryl blinked at the speaker for a minute, and then tossed it over to Tweed and shrugged out of her knapsack again. “Hang on …”
She dug around in the front pocket and emerged with the handful of typewritten index cards that the twins had collected from the place where the curiosities exhibit tent had stood in the field after the World-O-Wonders carnival had bugged out of town. Tweed briefed Feedback on the carnival leftovers the girls had collected while Cheryl shuffled through the cards until she found the one she was looking for.
“Eureka!” she exclaimed and held it aloft triumphantly. When Feedback and Tweed and Artie and Pilot crowded around to see, she held the card out so they could read the faded words. “Check it out, guys!”
“Hey!” Simon’s muffled protest sounded from the crook of Tweed’s elbow. “I can’t see!”
Tweed rolled her eyes and shifted the speaker, holding it up so that the glare from the Spirit Stone illuminated the card.
“Right!” the departed mystic said. “That’s it. I remember now. Dudley would yammer on and on to carnival-goers about how the antiques dealer he bought the knob from had sworn he could hear the thing whispering and giggling dementedly in the middle of the night.”
“Boy, there sure was an awful lot of exploding going on back in your day,” Artie said.
“Well, that kind of thing sometimes happens when mystical convergences go sideways,” Simon said. “Occupational hazard. With Hecklestone, it was all about the ectoplasm.”
“Ecto-what-now?” Artie raised an eyebrow at him.
“Ectoplasm. Residue from the astral plane.”
Cheryl and Tweed nodded in sage understanding.
“Hecklestone was convinced it was an untapped renewable energy resource,” Simon said. “Kind of like … crude oil with a spectral kick.”
“Wow.” Feedback shook his head. “The Victorians were really kind of weird.” He glanced at the speaker. “Er. No offence, Mr. Omar.”
“None taken,” Simon said graciously. “Totally agree. Most of us were absolute nutters! You see, back in the day, folks didn’t really distinguish between magic and science the same way you lot seem to now,” he explained. “I mean, Thomas Edison, that great scientific inventor, called himself the Wizard of Menlo Park and was forever yammering on about inventing a spirit phone to talk to the dead! He could have just come to one of my shows!”
“I read somewhere that people thought that inventor dude Nikola Tesla was either some kind of a sorcerer or was using technology from aliens,” Feedback said with a disbelieving snort. “I mean, seriously. UFOs?”
Cheryl and Tweed exchanged a glance, but under the circumstances, they thought that correcting Feedback’s misconceptions about the subject of extraterrestrials would probably just overload the poor kid’s brain circuits. So they kept quiet and listened as Simon continued.
“Oh, no,” said the mystic speaker. “Tesla was just really good at math. But like I said, it was hard to tell the difference.”
“You coulda told us this Heckle-stuff earlier, y’know.” Cheryl glowered at the speaker. “Like before we actually set foot inside this house.”
“I tried to tell you!” Simon protested. “You stuffed me in a bag.”
“Yeah? That was ages ago. You could have piped up since then.”
“I told you, I forgot.” His voice turned sulky. “I forget a lot of things. And speaking of ages, I’ve been dead for several of them and you’re criticizing my faulty memory? Very sensitive.”
“All right, all right. Don’t pout!” Cheryl sighed. “We’re here now. We just have to figure out how to get not here. So … first things first. Can somebody please tell me—what the heck is a doorknob from a ’sploded house in England doing attached to the door of a house in Wiggins Cross?”
Tweed put a finger in the air, silencing her cousin again, while she knit her forehead in a fierce frown beneath her dark bangs. Cheryl recognized the signs: Tweed was having a brainwave. But she held her tongue.
“Okaaaay,” Tweed mused. “Let’s think about this. On the one hand, we have the jewel from a turban, containing the actual trapped spirit of a magician who dabbled in the occult—”
“I was hardly a dabbler!”
“Shh!” Cheryl put a hand over the speaker’s grille.
“— and who is able now to manifest after the Egyptian portal explosion shot out a wave of arcane energy …” Tweed continued, ignoring the mystic’s protest. “What if, on the other hand, we now have a doorknob that was also actually likewise inhabited by the spirits of the departed—in this case, the Hecklestone kids, victims of the aforementioned explodination. What if that same Egyptian mystical energy wave activated them the same way? Simon can talk now because the speaker allows him to. What if there was, say, an old house already sitting on this chunk of land when the portal blew? What if the Dudley doorknob landed on it, embedding itself in the same way Simon Omar’s Spirit Stone fused with our Drive-In speaker?”
“And the paranormal energy that was released from the doorknob rebuilt the house in the image of its former self!” Feedback exclaimed, following the logic of Tweed’s theory.
“And provided an environment in which to contain its former occupants …” Tweed nodded and glanced around the room, half-expecting to see the three Hecklestone kids listening in on the conversation. But if they were, she couldn’t tell. “If the emanations were strong enough, they might very well have alte
red the surrounding plot of land. And more! Do you ever remember an Eerie Lane in Wiggins before now, Feedback?”
“Nope. I even tried to dial it up on my phone’s GPS, but all I got was random pixels.” He snorted in derision. “I had to look at an old-fashioned paper map to get here—and it was so faded I almost missed finding this place. Now I wish I had.”
“Gah!” Cheryl shuddered, thinking about the weird and wacky assortment of objects that she and her cousin were unintentionally responsible for scattering around the town. “Those carnival Duds shot all over Wiggins,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me that every single piece of dusty junk in that tent is now gonna come to life and mess with the town? We’re gonna have to clear our schedule!”
Tweed frowned. “You could be right, partner. Hopefully it’s not as bad as all that,” she said. “I mean, as much of a scammer as Dudley was, most of that stuff was probably nothing more than dime-store trash. He probably just got lucky with a few authentic curiosities, and I don’t think he realized that some of the exhibits in his collection really were the real thing. Not beyond the mummy princess, anyway. As it is, I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that Bob Ruth’s softball isn’t going to conjure up an army of ghostly baseball players or anything …”
“I hope not!” Artie said. “I took that thing home— it’s sitting on my nightstand—and I’d have a real tough time explaining that to my mom …”
“Hey,” Tweed said with a grin, “at least your tail and scales disappeared.”
“Please.” Artie ran a hand through his slicked-back hair and adjusted his glasses. “I rocked that croc.”
Feedback had been silent for a few moments, just staring back and forth between the girls. Now he backed off a step, shaking his head. “Whoa,” he said. “I’d heard you guys had radically unconventional sitter techniques. Now I’m just thinking you’re radically unconventional about everything. Also? Kinda freaking me out.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Cheryl flipped her pigtails back. “We train for situations like this.”
The Haunting of Heck House Page 9
