Thumpthump … thumpthumpthump … thump.
The thumpthumpthumping seemed to be coming from inside the walls.
“Oh, man,” Feedback muttered. “What now?”
Cheryl and Tweed shook themselves from their moment of doubt and stepped forward, hauling out putter and Nerf dart-gun respectively. Pilot slid his new monkey wrench out of his overalls loop. Artie hefted the heavy leather book that had so effectively knocked him for a loop. Together, they took up defensive stances, shoulder to shoulder.
The other three sitters readily let them—none of them really having much experience in hand-to-hand combat—and waited for the next episode of weirdness to unfold. A tense silence descended on the subterranean laboratory. And then the wall made a noise that sounded like “MMrggwrgl?”
Artie elbowed Pilot and the twins aside and trotted up to lean against one of the walls, his ear pressed to the panelling.
“Mrgwllr?” he gurgled back. “Shack, buddy? That you? I was wondering where you’d got to …”
“What is that little nutcase doing?” Hazel asked, clearly not having succumbed to the charms of Artie’s wardrobe makeover in the same way that Cindy had.
“GRrrwlrgggm …?” Artie murmured, ignoring her. “Is there a trip lever? A latch or a button or something?”
“Art-Bart?” Pilot asked. “What are you—”
“It’s Ramshackle!” Artie explained. “He’s in the wall. He’s been part of this house since it was built—er, y’know, before it exploded—”
“Before it what?” Hazel asked, baffled.
“—and he probably knows every nook and cranny and super-secret passageway!”
“Of which there seem to be way too many, if you ask me!” Feedback exclaimed. “Seriously! Who builds a place like this? What’s wrong with using the front hall stairs?!”
Artie gargled a few more questions in Gargoyle and turned back to the others. “I asked him to see if he can open the passage for us …”
“Who’s Ramshackle?” Hazel asked, suspicious.
“A friend,” Cheryl said before anyone could blurt out the exact species of that “friend.” She somehow didn’t think Hazel and Cindy would buy that story. “He’s going to help us.”
“I told you—we don’t need your help!” Cindy glared mutinously.
In that instant, a section of wall panelling slid aside, revealing another spiral staircase leading upward. Tweed turned to Cindy, who wore an expression of blank astonishment on her face.
“Okay, then,” she said with a small, grimly satisfied smile. “I guess we’ll just be shutting this here hidden passageway behind us when we go and you can find your own.”
“No!” Hazel cried. “Wait!”
“C’mon!” Artie exclaimed, bounding up the stairs two at a time.
The others followed hastily in his wake, just in case the wall decided to slide shut again. The top of the hidden staircase exited out through the front of a big old grandfather clock. Artie pushed open the false face of the timepiece and stepped into the living room/study, whispering to Ramshackle to strike a pose on the ornate mantel of the fireplace—where a pale-flamed fire now burned—and not move.
Cindy and Hazel came out next, having pushed past Cheryl and Tweed on the narrow spiral stair in their rush to escape the lab. As Cindy passed the fireplace, she looked up to see the gargoyle, doing his best impression of his stony daylight persona. She pulled a sour face and muttered, “What a creepy statue!”
Pilot was the last one up. He immediately started checking all the windows in the room. The big oak door in the marble foyer beyond was doubtless still locked but maybe one of the study windows would be open. No such luck. They were all latched tight, painted shut, and utterly unbudgeable. The fire burning in the fireplace discouraged trying to shimmy up the chimney—especially when it flared dramatically, hissing and popping like a living thing as Pilot approached the hearth.
“You know,” he said with a sigh, “as much as I hate to advocate the destruction of personal property, I say we’re gonna have to try to break a wind—”
“That’s it! Outta my way!!” Cheryl bellowed as she tore past him, brandishing the heavy iron poker from the fireplace high over her head. “I’ve had enough of this hokey-pokey!”
“Does she mean hocus-pocus?” Feedback asked.
“Let her go, pal,” Artie said. “She’s on a roll.”
Cheryl brought the poker crashing down onto the window glass—only to have it bounce right off!
“That’s quality Victorian manor house window glass there, missy,” Simon whispered at her from his concealment. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
It was true. The pane was so thick its surface was rippled and hard to see through. But she hadn’t even cracked it!
“Plus it’s probably reinforced with ectoplasmic residue,” he continued. “This whole house was reconstituted from nothing but a doorknob, remember. There’s some pretty hefty mystic might that went into creating this place, and those windows are no exception. I mean, I’m sure it makes for lower heating bills come the winter and all but—”
“I don’t care!” Cheryl howled in frustration. “I don’t plan on still being here in the winter! I don’t plan on still being here in the morning!”
She bashed at the window a dozen more times but it was no use. In the silence that followed, the fire crackled with a sound like grim chuckling.
“Hey …” Feedback said, looking around. “Where are the other sitters?”
Cheryl and Tweed looked around. “They didn’t fall through another trap door, did they?” Cheryl asked, not particularly upset by the prospect.
“Cindy?” Artie called. “Hazel?”
Silence.
Followed by the sound of a key turning in a heavy lock.
It came from the foyer of the house.
Cheryl and Tweed exchanged a glance and then ran for the grand front foyer, the boys hot on their heels. They were just in time to see Hazel, a fistful of lock picks clutched tightly in one hand, throw her arms up in the air in triumph.
“Yes!” Cindy pushed her out of the way and heaved open the door.
Scrambling over top of each other in their haste, the pair lurched over the threshold and out onto the porch—just as the enormous bronze doorknob began to glow to angry life! Cindy and Hazel screamed in fright, and over their panicked cries, the others heard the ghostly wailing sounds of the Hecklestone Trio of Terror crying out. But then the roar of a gale-force wind blotted out the cacophony of voices as it came boiling down the chimney flue and burst out of the gaping maw of the living-room fireplace like an invisible freight train. It rushed past, almost bowling the bunch of them over, and slammed the front door shut again!
With Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi on the outside.
The doorknob was pulsing with furious spectral energy in glow-stick hues of goblin green, and when the sound of the lock tumbling back into place boomed through the house, it blazed like a beacon and then went dark. The keyhole glared like the empty eye socket in a skull and the twins knew, even without trying it, that the door would be locked up tight as a bank vault again.
The girls ran to the window on one side of the big oak door and looked out. The boys ran to the other. Out on the porch, Cindy and Hazel stood gasping, wild-eyed and crazy-haired.
“Hey! You guys can’t just leave us here!” Feedback shouted.
“Yes, we can!” Hazel said, her voice muffled by the thick Victorian ecto-windows. “I quit this stupid contest! You win, you buncha cheater weirdos! And you can tell Old Man Hecklestone we’ve got better things to do than to house-sit his creepy old mansion, anyway.”
“Wait!” Artie pressed his hands up against the window beside the front door. “Cindy! I thought we had the start of a beautiful friendship!”
In the darkness lit only by the glow of the flickering porch lamp, Cindy’s expression wavered for a brief moment. Then she shook her head, and through the thick glass, they hea
rd her say, “Sorry, handsome! I’m looking out for number one! We’re getting out of here. Good luck finding the fridge!”
Then she grabbed Hazel by the arm and dragged her off the porch, and the two of them tore down the path like a pack of ghouls was nipping at their heels.
“Huh …” Artie turned away from the window after they disappeared and Pilot put a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Dames.” Artie snorted. “Right, Armbruster?”
“Right, Art-Bart.” Pilot sighed wearily and wandered over to sit on the bottom step of the staircase. “Can’t live with ’em.”
“That’s it?” Cheryl blinked, stunned by the suddenness of their rivals’ departure. “We won?”
Tweed stared out the window with a faraway gaze, watching as the running shapes of Cindy and Hazel grew small in the distance at the end of the front yard path. “I guess we did,” she said wonderingly. “I mean … it doesn’t feel like winning …”
“No,” Feedback said. “It kinda really doesn’t.”
“Can you guys please just forget about that stupid contest for a minute?” Pilot huffed in frustration. “Even if it was a real thing and not just something to lure you all here—which, hello, it clearly was—you’re all taking this matter of ‘professional sitter pride’ just a little too far!”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Cheryl said, “but, Pilot, you’re right.”
“You never thought you’d say I was right?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No. About us taking our sitter business too seriously.” She sighed. “Clearly Cindy and Hazel do have skills. And so do you, Feedback. We’re not the only game in town. We shouldn’t be.”
“I didn’t quite mean it like that, Cher-bear,” Pilot said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Of course you should take your business seriously. You’re good at it—great at it—and you should be proud. What I meant was I think we need fewer super-sitters and more monster-mashers just at the moment!”
“Speaking as one of the aforementioned super-sitters,” Feedback said, raising his hand, “I’ll second that motion!”
The tension eased for a moment as the twins shook themselves out of their brief slump. One thing was for sure: the absence of Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi sure made things a whole lot quieter around the house.
Until Simon suddenly piped up brightly, saying, “Well, I’d say that was rather a lucky stroke of luck, eh, wot?”
“What was?” Cheryl asked, digging him out of the pocket of her knapsack.
“Getting that front door open like that.”
“No it wasn’t! We’re still stuck here.”
“Oh, no,” the speaker explained. “Not for you. I meant, that was rather a stroke of luck for those girls. I mean, they timed it just right.”
“They did?”
“Sure!” he said. “You probably distracted the house with your window bashing just long enough for them to jimmy open that door and escape. Doubt they would have managed it otherwise.”
“Wait.” Tweed put up a hand. “You think the house has a … a what? A personality? Awareness?”
“Is that even possible?” Pilot asked. “I mean, do you really think an inanimate object can have a personality?” The speaker seemed to glare at him until Pilot realized what he’d just said. “Oh. Uh, sorry. No offence …”
“I’d say it’s a definite possibility,” Simon said after another moment of silent glaring and a haughty sniff. “There was probably an enormous amount of ectoplasm soaked up by this house back in the day, what with Hecklestone’s experiments and seances and whatnot. Now, in the wake of your Egyptian-princess rescue, the resulting mystical ka-boom not only gave the house the power to reconstruct itself, it’s also allowed it to take on a spectral life of its own.”
“A spectral life with a really bad temper,” Artie muttered, tossing the book that had conked him on the noggin onto a stair and slumping down beside it. Ramshackle appeared from the study and wandered over to head-butt him on the knee. Artie gave him a skritch behind his horn stubs and the little monster began to purr.
“Honestly,” Simon continued in a scolding tone, “didn’t anyone ever tell you people that messing around with otherworldly portals should only be handled by experts?”
“Um … you were an expert there, too, weren’t you, Speakie?” Cheryl pointed out.
The glare from the Spirit Stone narrowed. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“D’you think Cindy and Hazel will send help?” Artie wondered.
“Ha. I doubt it,” Feedback scoffed, an expression of disdain curling his lip. “I know how those two operate and I’d bet my Xbox that they probably hoodwinked their folks, too, so they could come here tonight. They won’t tell anyone ’cause they don’t want anyone to know they were here!”
Cheryl frowned. “But …”
“Feedback’s right, pal,” Tweed said. “We know how competitive Cindy and Hazel are. And we know what they think about us.”
“We’re not weird,” Cheryl grumbled.
“Sure we are!” Tweed said brightly (well, as brightly as she ever actually said anything). “And we should be proud of that. We’re not like everyone else. And we’re not like Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi. We’d help them. I mean, we’d at least think about it.”
Pilot shrugged. “I dunno. I’m inclined to cut ’em some slack on not sending help, only because I don’t even think they think we’re in really real trouble. You heard them. They think you two were behind all those spooky shenanigans just so you guys could win the sitter contest!”
“Arggh!” Cheryl screwed up her face and thrust Simon the speaker at Tweed. Her frustration at their entrapment boiling over again, she turned to pound on the door with both fists. Then with the fireplace poker. “Let us out, you haunted Heck House! Let! Us! OUT!!” The heavy oak planking shuddered beneath the blows and the doorknob began to glow angrily again. “LET US GO!!” she shouted as she continued her assault.
The others watched, astonished, until Ramshackle suddenly let out a loud “MrrORWrr!” and Cheryl froze, poker held high.
“What was that?” she asked, gasping for breath.
“He said, ‘That’s just what they keep saying,’” Artie said.
She turned and shot Artie a questioning look. He shrugged and bent an ear toward the little gargoyle and listened while the thing growled and grumbled. After a few moments, he turned back to the twins. “The kids— whatstheirnames—Ramshackle said that’s what they keep saying.”
“Let them out from where?” Tweed asked. “Seems to me they’ve been roaming free all over this old house!”
Ramshackle shook his head at the word free.
“Well …” Tweed frowned. “If that’s not the case, where are they now?”
The gargoyle turned to glare pointedly up the stairs as the angry green glow from the doorknob faded back to almost nothing. Cheryl gazed up the stairs and she remembered the dressing room—and the things she’d thought she’d seen, moving behind the mirror glass …
“I think I know,” she said. “C’mon, guys. We’re gonna get to the bottom of this once and for all. Tweed? Follow me. Bring Speaker Boy.”
“What are we going to do?” Tweed asked as she ran up the stairs beside her cousin.
“We’re gonna take a page from Freddy and Marlene’s movie script,” Cheryl said.
“You mean Ding Dong, You’re Dead Freddy and Marlene?” Tweed thought back to the hapless haunted couple in the movie they’d watched only the night before. It seemed like ages ago. “You mean … we’re going to scream and flail and generally run around like idiots?”
“Yup,” Cheryl said, reaching the landing and turning left. The door to the library they’d been locked inside once again stood wide open. “Well, no. Not really. But we are going to hold a seance.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Tweed said grimly.
Because look how well it had turned out for Freddy and Marlene.
13 THE GHOSTS AND MR. SPEAKER
“Huh,” Cheryl whispered. “I was wondering what had happened to the wreckage …”
“Weird,” Tweed whispered back. “The house rebuilt it. Just like it rebuilt itself.”
Cheryl tugged her by the sleeve across the hall into the dressing room and the others followed. She motioned for Tweed to hand over the speaker and turned it so the ruby eye was facing her. “You were a … a whaddayacallit back in the day, right?” Cheryl said to Simon. “A medium?”
“I always thought of myself as rather well-done!” the speaker answered and laughed at his own joke.
Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Look here, Speakie. There’s something more to these ghosts than meets the eye. Er, what I mean by that is, we’ve never actually seen them. Only heard them. I don’t think they’re strong enough to appear to us. I think there is something preventing them from really showing up to the show. I wanna know what that something is.” She turned to her cousin. “When we were in here before, I thought I saw—actually saw— them. Sort of. In those mirrors there.”
Tweed kneeled down to examine the surface of the glass. “There are handprints—on the inside!”
“Exactly!” Cheryl nodded, leaning over her cousin’s shoulder to examine the smudgy marks that had vanished earlier and had now reappeared. As if by … magic!
“You think they’re—what—trapped in there?” Pilot asked. “Prisoners?”
“That’s dastardly!” Artie exclaimed.
“Let’s find out,” Cheryl said. “Somebody go grab that crystal ball off the table in the library.” She sank down cross-legged in the middle of the plush dressing-room carpet.
“I’ll do it!” Feedback scurried off.
Cheryl told the others to join her in a circle on the floor and asked Tweed, who, between the two of them, was the film-based expert on the occult, to explain what they were about to do.
The Haunting of Heck House Page 12
