The House Where Nobody Lived

by Brad Strickland

  On that Sunday night, though, everything in the room seemed vaguely wrong. An apprehensive Lewis took no book to bed with him, and as he lay sleepless, he twitched and flinched at each crackle of an ember in the fireplace. The flickering, ruddy light from the fire made shifting red patterns on the ceiling, reminding Lewis of the volcanic fountains shimmering in the mirror, of the fiery mask of a face he had glimpsed, and of the stolen pearl thrown by Potsworth Stevenson, bursting into a comet-like flare as it flew through the twilight. Every time Lewis closed his eyes, he seemed to hear a distant, threatening drumming. He would feel sweaty and panicky until he identified the source of the sound. Sometimes it was just the wind tap-tapping a shrub against the house, and other times it was his own heartbeat. The glowing dial of Lewis’s bedside Westclox alarm clock kept telling him the hour was growing later. Eleven o’clock. Midnight. One in the morning.

  Finally Lewis slipped into a fitful sleep. He began to dream. In the dream, he and Rose Rita were eleven years old again, and they were walking down the overgrown lane toward the Hawaii House. Lewis felt a leaden weight on his heart, because he had that creepy sensation called déjà vu, the feeling that he had already been here and lived through this and knew, or almost knew, what was going to happen next.

  In the dream, somehow he and Rose Rita arrived at the house without having traveled all the way down the lane. They stood outside, looking up at the bleary, grimy windows. Rose Rita silently pointed, and following her gesture with his eyes, Lewis saw a window on the top floor slowly, slowly opening. It was the second window to the left of the tower and its open platform, where a terrified Abediah Chadwick had frozen to death rather than face what was behind the barricaded door.

  Lewis wanted to turn and run, but he couldn’t move his legs at all. He looked down. Somehow solid rock had grown up from the earth and enclosed his feet. He was frozen in place, like a statue on a pedestal. He looked at Rose Rita and wanted to shriek. She had been turned completely to stone, with one arm raised and blindly pointing.

  Fragments of prayers he had learned as an altar boy flitted through his mind: Ab insídiis diaboli, líbera nos, Dómine—“From the assaults of the devil, good Lord deliver us.” He tried to speak them aloud, but his jaws had locked. The window above opened fully, and he saw movement within. A sad-faced woman with long black hair gazed down at him. Then she beckoned him with her finger.

  Somehow without consciously moving, Lewis found himself inside the Hawaii House, his feet free of the clutching stone. He was in the parlor with the shelves of knickknacks. Some of them had come to life. He saw them squirm and writhe all around him. A grotesque carved mask opened and closed its mouth, revealing triangular teeth like a shark’s. On the deck of a model schooner, tiny sailors climbed the rigging and worked at the sails.

  Somehow, though, when Lewis looked directly at a shelf, nothing on it moved. Then he was climbing a narrow, dark staircase. He pushed through a door into a hallway, and through another door that led to a bedroom. The dusty window was wide open, and through it he could see the immobile form of Rose Rita below, stone eyes staring sightlessly up, stone finger pointing silently. The woman who had been here had vanished, like a puff of steam—or a ghost.

  The drums began to pound, not faint but loud and close by, and Lewis whirled. Through the wall came a shadowy, shoulder-hunched gray form, striding forward. Behind marched another, and another, and another—it was as if the wall had vanished, and Lewis could see an unending line of them, to the world’s edge and beyond. The lead marcher was a fierce-looking warrior in loincloth, a feathered cloak, and a crested helmet, and he carried a wooden spear shaped like a javelin. Lewis retreated until his back thudded into the wall—he had nowhere to run—the point of the spear thrust into his chest—

  He rolled right out of bed and woke as he tumbled to the floor, and for a moment he could not bring himself to realize that he was safe in his own room and that the marching ghosts were just part of a nightmare. The loud sound he heard was not the doom-laden drumbeat of the marchers, but his alarm clock. He must have thrashed around in his sleep and knocked it off, because it lay facedown on the bed, its bell muffled to a rat-tat-tat sound.

  Lewis shakily untangled his legs from the sheets and stood up. He heard the lash of rain against the window and saw gray light outside. He picked up the clock. It was time for him to get up and go to school.

  As he bathed and dressed, Lewis kept feeling as if he were on the deck of a ship at sea. The floor beneath his feet seemed to lift and fall, and his head spun from sleepiness. He debated what he should say to Uncle Jonathan, or if he should even say anything. After all, a dream couldn’t really hurt you, and Uncle Jonathan would probably chalk it up to their talk with Grampa Galway.

  When he was ready, Lewis tiptoed down the front stair. He slipped quietly into the dining room, where Uncle Jonathan already sat reading the newspaper and eating a bowl of Cheerios and some burnt-looking toast. He was a rotten cook, but he never liked to admit that, and whenever Uncle Jonathan fouled up a recipe, he usually ate the mess, while stubbornly insisting that it was delicious. “Good morning,” he said to Lewis. “Good if you happen to be a duck or a tadpole, that is. Maybe I’d better drive you to school today, so you don’t arrive looking like Jonah just after the great fish spewed him up on the shores of Mesopotamia.”

  Lewis grunted. He took down a bowl and poured cereal and milk into it. He got a glass of orange juice to drink. Sliding into his usual chair at the table, he tried hard to look as if everything were normal.

  Uncle Jonathan sipped his coffee and gazed silently at his nephew for a few moments. “Want the funny papers?” he asked, passing the newspaper across the table.

  “Thanks.” Lewis thumbed through the paper as he ate, stopping at the comics section.

  Uncle Jonathan shook his head. “All right. Come clean. What’s wrong with you?”

  Lewis blinked. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”

  “For one thing, you’re trying to read the adventures of Dick Tracy and the Phantom upside down. For another, you look like you just went a couple of rounds in the ring with Rocky Marciano.” Marciano was a champion heavyweight boxer, and Lewis couldn’t even imagine trying to trade blows with him.

  “All this business with the Hawaii House is making it hard for me to sleep,” he confessed.

  “I know what you mean,” Uncle Jonathan said. “Finish your breakfast and we’ll break out the foul-weather gear and set off in the teeth of the roaring gale.” He put his thumbs in the lower pockets of his vest and pushed back from the table, reciting:

  The skipper hauled at the heavy sail:

  “God be our help!” he only cried,

  As the roaring gale, like the stroke of a flail,

  Smote the boat on its starboard side.

  Lewis flinched as the wind outside howled and smote the Barnavelt house like a flail, or at least like a cat-o’-nine-tails. Jonathan said mildly, “That’s literature, you know. It’s a poem called ‘The Wreck of Rivermouth,’ by old John Greenleaf Whittier.”

  “Is it?” asked Lewis in a small voice.

  “We used to have to memorize poetry by the ream when I was in school,” murmured Jonathan. Behind his bushy, white-streaked red beard, he smiled. “Do they make you memorize them nowadays? Do you know Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘Old Ironsides’?”

  Lewis drank the last of his orange juice and nodded.

  “Let’s say it together as we drive to school,” suggested Uncle Jonathan. “That’s a fine poem of anger and defiance, and I think we need a little of both right now!”

  So they drove through whipping curtains of ferocious gray rain, reciting the poem that Oliver Wendell Holmes had written when some politicians wanted to scrap the famous old warship U.S.S. Constitution. It began with the ringing words:

  Aye, tear her tattered ensign down,

  Long has it waved on high,

  And many an eye has danced to see

  That banner i
n the sky!

  When Uncle Jonathan pulled the car up in front of the school, he put a hand on Lewis’s shoulder, stopping him from getting out into the storm for a moment. “Lewis,” he said, “I want you to remember something. When Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that poem in 1830, everyone was sure that Old Ironsides was going to be torn to pieces. But here it is more than a hundred years later, and do you know what? Old Ironsides is still floating in Boston Harbor, and she’s still part of the navy. And now we face trouble too, but we are going to see this thing through. And at the end of it, David and his family are going to be in safe waters. Now, run and try not to drown before you can get inside!”

  Lewis did. The cold rain stung his face and blatted against his yellow slicker, but somehow he felt a little more hopeful about weathering his own storm of fear and worry.

  CHAPTER 14

  WHILE THE GALE HOWLED outside, school dragged on. Rose Rita had a study period with David, and since she was one of those people who always did their studying days ahead of time, she didn’t have to work hard to catch up, the way some kids did. She saw with alarm that David looked worse than ever. She had briefly spoken to Lewis just after they both arrived at school, and Lewis had also appeared strained and tense, with red eyes and a drooping, tired expression.

  David was ten times worse. His face was as lined as a little old man’s, and his red-rimmed eyes darted back and forth like two animals trapped in shallow, dark caves. Even the bullies were leaving him alone these days—he looked so beat-up that maybe they were afraid they’d get blamed for fighting with him.

  The teacher in the study hall had a habit of waiting until the students had begun to read their texts or scribble in their notebooks, then strolling down to the teachers’ lounge for a cup of coffee. As soon as she left, Rose Rita turned around and spoke to David, who sat at the desk behind her: “Are you all right?”

  David nodded, but his lower lip quivered, and he blurted, “N-no!” He gasped for air, then jerked his head toward a table in the far back corner of the room, where students sat to work on group projects. He picked up his math book and headed back to the table, and Rose Rita got her own book and followed him. By then nobody was paying much attention, anyway. As soon as the teacher had gone, everyone started talking and joking, just quietly enough so that the next-door teacher wouldn’t hear and come in to scold them.

  Under cover of the buzz and rustle of all those conversations, David opened his math book and bent down over it. Rose Rita sat across from him and opened her book too. “What’s up?” she asked in little more than a whisper.

  David had to try several times before he could speak. “D-do you buh-believe in guh-ghosts?” he stammered. “B-b-because I, I really do think our h-h-house is huhhaunted.”

  Rose Rita felt a pang inside. She remembered some terrifying times—the ghostly figure that Lewis had accidentally summoned once when his uncle gave him a lucky three-cent piece, the terrible haunted opera house where an evil spirit had cast a spell to enslave the world, and other bad memories. “I have to,” she said. “I’ve sort of seen some.”

  David’s face contorted as he began to spill out the reasons for his question. He started with Uncle Jonathan’s remark, went on to the things Lewis had hinted at, and wound up with things he had seen and heard. Rose Rita had to listen hard, and sometimes he had to repeat himself. She followed the drift, though.

  As Mr. Keller had repaired the floors of the upstairs bedrooms, the sound of the night drums had grown worse. Though not much more than painting remained to be done in the rooms, now Mr. Keller would never spend more than half an hour upstairs. Complaining that the paint fumes were too strong, he would come back down and rest, but as often as not he would decide not to go back up. This was not like David’s father, who always said that you should plan a job so that you could work at it and finish it as soon as possible. David said he thought his father looked scared after these episodes. “H-he h-h-hears things up th-there,” David said urgently.

  His mother was losing sleep too, and she and Mr. Keller were having bitter arguments about money late at night. David was beginning to hate going to bed. If he didn’t hear the sounds of his parents’ angry voices, he heard the pounding of those drums.

  When David finished, Rose Rita was silent for a few moments. Then she asked, “Have you seen anything?”

  “Men,” David said. “An a-army of m-men.”

  When the storm blew itself out that afternoon, the autumn leaves lay strewn and soggy on the ground, and the trees reached bare, skeletal fingers up toward the clearing sky. Rose Rita spoke to Lewis, and what she had to say dismayed him.

  “I can’t!” he said in despair as they walked past sodden lawns and streaming gutters.

  “You’ll have to,” said Rose Rita urgently. “I certainly can’t go to David’s house for a sleepover. He wants someone else to see and hear these things, just so he’ll know he isn’t losing his mind. The Kellers know they sort of owe you one, because of how your uncle has helped them. If David asks his mom and dad if you can come and spend the night this coming Friday, they’ll say yes. Look, Lewis, you’ve got to get up the nerve for this. I know it’s a lot to ask—”

  “Don’t rub it in,” moaned Lewis. “I hate being a coward.”

  “You’re not,” insisted Rose Rita. “You have plenty of reason to be afraid. But you know what a hero is? It’s someone who’s afraid and still does what he has to do, that’s all.”

  “But what am I supposed to do?”

  “Maybe Mrs. Zimmermann can tell us.”

  They walked to her house beneath a sky of flying, broken clouds, buffeted by increasingly chilly gusts of wind. It looked as if a real cool spell was moving in, a taste of winter days ahead. Rose Rita knocked on the door, and Mrs. Zimmermann answered it almost at once. She must have been in the parlor already. “My goodness,” she said. “Come in, you two. You look as glum as a gib-cat!”

  “What’s that?” asked Rose Rita.

  “To tell the truth, I don’t know!” responded Mrs. Zimmermann with a chuckle. “Shakespeare mentions it in one of his plays—Henry IV, I think. ‘As melancholy as a gib-cat,’ it goes, and though I don’t know what one is, that’s the way you look. Sit down and tell me what the trouble is. More supernatural goings-on at the Hawaii House?”

  “Yes,” said Rose Rita, and she quickly explained what David had told her and what she had asked Lewis to do.

  Mrs. Zimmermann listened solemnly. Then she gave Lewis a keen, knowing glance. “I’d say the decision is up to Lewis, but it may be a good idea. I have spent a lot of time driving to universities and calling people who study folklore and mythology.”

  “We tried to research that too,” said Lewis. “But the trouble is, our school library has hardly anything about Hawaii at all, except in the encyclopedias, and the public library just has two travel books.”

  “Information is sort of hard to come by,” admitted Mrs. Zimmermann. “However, I have found out a few things that have me caught betwixt and between, as they say down South. Did any of the encyclopedias or books you found mention Kamehameha?”

  Lewis looked at Rose Rita, and she stared blankly back at him. “No,” they said almost together.

  “It ties in to the Hawaii House, but in a kind of complicated way. Anyhow, Kamehameha was the first king to unite all of the Hawaiian Islands under one rule. He was born at a time when the islands had four different quarreling kings. He became a respected warrior, and during one of his battles, the volcano sacred to Pele erupted and destroyed so many of his enemies that Kamehameha’s army won a great victory. The people decided that meant Pele was on his side.

  “Well, to make a long story short, before 1800, Kamehameha became the single king of all the Hawaiian people. The Hawaiians think of him the way we think of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln put together.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” said Rose Rita. “But what does he have to do with the Hawaii House?”

  Mrs. Zim
mermann laughed. “Heavens, Rose Rita, you get right to the point. Well, the short answer again is this: Makalani was distantly related to Kamehameha. She truly had royal blood in her veins. Now, I think she fell deeply in love with Abediah Chadwick, and I believe he loved her. But I can guess at what must have happened. One of her relatives on the islands resented her running away with an American sailor, even if he was a wealthy man. That relative, whoever he or she was, appealed to Pele.”

  “It’s a kind of curse, then,” Lewis said.

  “Exactly so,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “When people took anything, even a fragment of hardened lava, from Pele’s islands, she saw to it that they had plenty of misery unless they returned it. Now it appears that Pele—or some force, anyway—has sent ghostly warriors to patrol the Hawaii House. They can be dangerous, as you very well know, but one thing they can’t do is to retrieve solid objects. Like all ghosts, they are insubstantial and pass right through ordinary matter, the way we pass through air.”

  “Then how do they kill people?” asked Rose Rita.

  In a resigned voice, Mrs. Zimmermann said, “I am an expert in magic amulets and talismans, Rose Rita, not a student of the unnatural history of ghosts. I imagine that they separate the spirits of the living from their bodies in some way, and without the spirit, the body perishes. Anyway, if, and it is a big if, we could discover just what the Marching Dead are trying to find or retrieve, we would stand a good chance of being able to help David and his family.”

  “Isn’t there another way?” asked Lewis.

  “Who knows? There may well be, but I haven’t come across any. Oh, I wish there were some foolproof, easy way to put an end to our doubts and our suspicions, but there isn’t. At any rate, we members of the Capharnaum County Magicians Society have sworn not to allow any evil magic to operate in our territory, and—”

  Someone pounded on the door, and everyone jumped a foot. Mrs. Zimmermann rose from her armchair, but a moment later the door opened and Uncle Jonathan poked his head in. “I thought you two might be here,” he said to Lewis. “What’s this? A meeting of the Committee to Chase Out Haunts, Ghoulies, and Ghosties without me?”