The House Where Nobody Lived

by Brad Strickland

  “Oh, come in, Fat Ears,” said Mrs. Zimmermann tartly. “We were trying to work out a plan to take a peek inside the top floor of the Kellers’ house.”

  “I still think I should volunteer to help out with the painting,” said Uncle Jonathan.

  “You’d be too busy to do any good,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “Besides, we have already fouled things up once. No, we have an alternative—but it will mean that Lewis will be the one who must look around.”

  Lewis felt as if a chill hand had just clutched him around the neck. Mrs. Zimmermann continued, “Of course, we plan to be close by. I can arrange things so the amulet will give us a warning if anything serious begins to happen. The crystal in my umbrella handle will flash and flare.”

  “And we’ll come riding to the rescue,” put in Uncle Jonathan. “Armed to the teeth with protective spells and loaded for bear.”

  Rose Rita lowered her gaze and bit her lip. Lewis knew what she must be thinking: She would be brave enough to venture into the house alone. Only a girl couldn’t go on a sleepover at a boy’s house, so she couldn’t do it. None of them could, except for him. Lewis had the sensation, miserable and lonely, of being on the verge of letting them all down.

  Uncle Jonathan gave Lewis a quick glance. “Lewis, we can try to figure some other way if you’re not up to this, and we won’t think any the less of you. Tell me, do you want to go through with this plan?”

  Lewis was taking deep breaths. “No, I don’t,” he confessed. He couldn’t help remembering how bad David had looked in their classes together, or the story Rose Rita had told about the things he had heard and seen. Lewis knew exactly how David felt, trapped and hopeless. And if he were in David’s place, Lewis knew how badly he would want someone’s help. “I don’t want to,” Lewis continued, “but I think I have to.”

  Uncle Jonathan gazed at him for a long, long moment. “Lewis,” he said softly, in a strangely choked voice, “I am so proud of you.”

  Despite his fears, Lewis felt his heart swell with warmth and pride. He would risk anything—even anything the Hawaii House could throw at him—for his uncle’s words of praise and admiration.

  CHAPTER 15

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON, THE DAY before Halloween, was clear and unseasonably cold. Everything had been arranged with the Kellers, and Uncle Jonathan dropped Lewis off at five. Lewis carried his gym bag with a change of clothes. Under his shirt, where no one could see, he was wearing something Mrs. Zimmermann had given him. It was a powerful protective amulet on a thin gold chain. The magical item looked a little like the orb on Mrs. Zimmermann’s umbrella: a small crystal ball, about half the size of a marble, with a faint purple light lurking inside it.

  “This is very ancient,” Mrs. Zimmermann had confided to him. “It dates from 1050 B.C. and once decorated the hilt of a mystic sword. It’s belonged to scads of good magicians over the years, and at last it fell into the hands of a descendant of the Knights Templar, one of my teachers when I studied magic. He gave it to me when I was still a student at the University of Göttingen, and I have kept it safe ever since.”

  “What is it?” Lewis had asked.

  With a wink, Mrs. Zimmermann replied, “Nothing at all but a sphere of quartz crystal, Lewis. Now, some people believe that some crystals send out super-duper vibrations that give good health and prosperity and so on. That simply is not true. But then, this particular crystal sphere has absorbed years and years of good influences, and many great and kindly sorcerers have cast beneficent spells on it. I don’t think even Pele herself could do harm to you as long as that little gem stays around your neck. And thanks to a little hocus-pocus of my own, it will also prove to be a guide to what we need to find.”

  Lewis nodded. He trusted Mrs. Zimmermann, but—well, he really hoped her spells would work.

  Friday afternoon came, and as he stood on the veranda of the Hawaii House, Lewis secretly touched the crystal globe hanging inside his shirt. He sent up a silent prayer asking for protection and freedom from fear and noticed as he did that he could see the vapor of his breath rising up like a soul heading for heaven. When Mrs. Keller opened the door, he steeled himself and gave her the best smile he could manage. David greeted him, and they sat at the dining room table playing checkers while Mrs. Keller cooked dinner.

  Ernest Keller dragged home from his job at the post office at five thirty. He mumbled a tired greeting and sank with a grateful-sounding sigh into a chair at the end of the table. He didn’t talk much as he watched David wipe the floor with Lewis at checkers, pulling off a spectacular triple jump that left him with three red kings and Lewis with one lonely pursued black checker. When David cornered Lewis’s last checker, Mr. Keller gave his son a smile. “Good game, boys,” he said, looking as if he were trying to hold in a yawn.

  David said quietly, “Thanks, Dad,” not stumbling over either word.

  Uncle Jonathan must have mentioned to Mr. Keller that he and Lewis were Catholic, Lewis thought, because for dinner Mrs. Keller served baked salmon, along with mixed vegetables and rice. Catholics were not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, but fish was allowed. It was a good, solid meal, and afterward, David and Lewis washed and dried the dishes, earning a weary “Thank you, boys,” from Mrs. Keller. The Kellers did not have a TV set, but Mr. Keller sat in a threadbare armchair in the parlor and listened to a boxing match on the radio, while Mrs. Keller settled down on the sofa, turned on a table lamp, and began to read a book. Lewis and David sat on the floor on either side of the coffee table and switched from checkers to chess. David wasn’t very good at that, so Lewis, who was an experienced if not great player, talked him through the game, showing him how to anticipate possible moves and traps.

  However, Lewis wasn’t an entirely attentive chess instructor that evening. His nerves were too strained, and his attention strayed so that he gave David bad advice and made some foolish moves. He spent every moment straining to hear the sound of drums. Outside the Hawaii House, deep night fell. At nine o’clock Mrs. Keller drew the curtains over those tall windows, but Lewis could feel the weight of darkness outside, pressing down on the house, pressing in on it. Somewhere out there his friends waited in Uncle Jonathan’s old car, perhaps sharing a thermos of hot cocoa or playing Twenty Questions to while away the time.

  Lewis looked longingly out into the night as Mrs. Keller closed the curtains on all the windows. As his ears listened for the sound of drums, his restless eyes strayed over the tall shelves and the memorabilia displayed on them. “Still got all this stuff, huh?” he asked.

  David nodded. The two of them looked over the collection on the shelves: ships and seashells, carvings and models, sextants and bo’s’n whistles. As David said, “I th-think this is wh-what the sailors used to f-find their location,” Lewis pressed his finger against the amulet he wore, but he felt nothing.

  He took the old brass sextant and looked at its array of lenses and mirrors. “I don’t know how to use one of these,” he said.

  David shrugged. “I don’t either.”

  When it was time for bed, Lewis found that the Kellers had set up a folding army cot in David’s room for him. Even though the bedroom had been intended for a servant, it was a big one, larger even than Lewis’s room, and a wide expanse of wood floor separated the cot from David’s bed against the opposite wall.

  The cot had been shoved against the wall beneath the room’s one window. Lewis got ready for bed, going into the bathroom between David’s room and his parents’ to change into his blue and gray diamond-patterned pajamas and carefully buttoning the jacket to hide the amulet.

  David sat on the edge of his bed and asked, “Wh-what are you up to, L-Lewis? Really?”

  He looked so upset that Lewis didn’t have the heart to lie. “Don’t be scared,” he said softly. “Listen: My uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann want to help you. They think you’re right about this house. It’s—it’s, well, kind of haunted.”

  David’s bloodshot eyes got round. “I knew it,” he whispered. “Are
y-your uncle and Mrs. Z-Zimmermann gh-ghost hunters?”

  “In a way.” Lewis didn’t want to spill all their secrets, but he did add, “They know that sometimes weird things are real, weird things that most people don’t believe in. They think the noises and the things you’ve seen are caused by something that the man who built this house left here. Tonight they want me to go looking for it.”

  “D-do I h-have to come?” asked David apprehensively.

  Lewis gulped down his fear. “No. I’ll call you if I need you.” David fell silent, and as Lewis lay there, he heard plenty of noises. The old house settled, its timbers creaked and groaned. A lonesome whip-poor-will called over and over from outside. With the lights out, the window above Lewis’s cot glowed a faint blue from the light of the rising moon.

  Louis lay with his eyes open, determined not to nod off. “Whatever you do,” Uncle Jonathan had warned, “don’t go to sleep. And try to slip upstairs before midnight if you can, or if you can’t, wait until one o’clock or later. No sense taking chances by going just at the witching hour.”

  David sighed and muttered, but eventually his breathing fell into a regular rhythm. The pale green dial of his bedside clock said that it was ten minutes past eleven. Cautiously, Lewis swung his legs off the cot and got to his feet.

  The wood floor felt hard and splintery beneath Lewis’s bare feet. He found his sneakers in the dark and slipped them on. He pulled the laces tight and tied them, then brought his feet down slowly and softly to keep the rubber soles from squeaking on the wood. David had not fully closed the bedroom door, and Lewis opened it inch by inch, not daring to push too hard in case the hinges groaned. He could hear muffled snoring coming from David’s parents’ room down past the bathroom. He had to go in the opposite direction.

  “Sst!” The whisper made Lewis leap in fright, his heart hammering.

  Behind him, David was sitting up in bed. Lewis could see his wide eyes gleaming in the faint light. “Shh,” Lewis warned him.

  “Wh-where are y-you going to search?”

  Lewis stepped back into the room and leaned against the wall. “Second floor. I have to see if I can find anything that’s causing the—the trouble,” he whispered. “Want to change your mind and help me?”

  David whimpered, and Lewis saw him sink back onto the bed. “It’s okay,” Lewis said softly. He forced himself to walk through the doorway, as difficult a step as he had ever taken.

  Into the darkened hall, with one hand on the wall to guide him, past the parlor, and then down the far hall to the stair. A twenty-five-watt bulb, hardly brighter than a night-light, burned halfway up at the landing, leaving the stairway below and above it in a dim half-illumination. Lewis held his breath as he climbed, praying that the amulet worked, that whatever lurked in the house would have no power over him. At the top of the stair, Lewis felt a shivery tingle. This was familiar to him. He had been here before—in that bad dream. At least Rose Rita wasn’t standing outside, petrified into stone.

  But he didn’t know which door led into the bedroom from which the woman in that dream had beckoned to him. He opened one of the two doors and in the faint spill of light leaking in from the landing below, he found another short flight of stairs leading upward to a closed door. Across from him, at the foot of this stair, he could barely make out another doorway.

  The short stair had to be the way up to the tower platform. That was the only part of the house it could possibly lead to. At the top of these stairs was the way out onto the open floor where Abediah Chadwick had frozen to death, afraid to return to the warmth of the house because something horrible was on the other side of the door.

  Lewis clutched the amulet under his pajama jacket. He stood for a moment on the landing, then opened the other door leading off the stairwell. A sharp scent of house paint stung his nostrils. He jerked in alarm as he saw a looming figure in the darkness, shrouded and glowing palely white in the moonlight streaming through the uncurtained windows. The monstrous shape had a flattened head, like the Frankenstein monster in the old movies, and it stood absolutely still, as still as a cat whose narrowed eyes had caught sight of a helpless mouse. With an effort, Lewis stifled a scream.

  And a moment later, he went limp with relief. The grim apparition was—nothing more than a stepladder, covered with a tarp, and a gallon bucket of paint stood balanced on the top step, providing the head.

  Lewis found the old-fashioned light switch and pushed the top button. It moved reluctantly, sinking under his finger and giving off a dull click.

  Nothing else happened. Either the bulbs were burned out, or the electricity in this room was not working. The darkness made everything Lewis had to do more difficult. The door behind him wanted to swing closed. Probably it was just badly balanced on its hinges, but Lewis couldn’t shake off the nervous feeling that unseen creatures were trying to push the door shut to seal off the little light filtering in from the one dim bulb in the stairway.

  Lewis felt around with his foot, searching for something to use to brace the door, but nothing lay within reach. He could dart over to the ladder, but the door would swing shut before he could grab the gallon of paint—and what if it locked itself? Possibly he could go downstairs and bring up something, but Lewis knew that once out of that room, he would never be able to get up the nerve to return to it. He knew what he had to do to find the source of the haunting—but he couldn’t bring himself to try it with only the feeble moonlight to help. All he needed was something to jam beneath the door. He had a sudden inspiration, bent over, and tugged the bows of his sneakers. He pulled off his shoes. They would have to do.

  He opened the door as wide as he could and tried to wedge the toe of one of the sneakers underneath, but the gap wasn’t wide enough. Maybe the rubber soles would provide enough friction to hold the door open and let the anemic light in.

  Lewis edged into the room, then reached under his collar and pulled out the amulet. As long as it was around his neck, Mrs. Zimmermann had said, he was safe. But now, following her instructions, he had to pull the chain over his head. He hoped with all his heart that just clutching the sphere would protect him. Holding the chain so the crystal hung straight down, he started to whisper the words that Mrs. Zimmermann had made him memorize, an ancient Latin incantation. If everything worked, if he was lucky—

  He felt a sort of vibration coming through the gold chain. The almost undetectable purple star deep in the heart of the little orb pulsed like a tiny flickering Christmas bulb. Slowly, slowly, the crystal began to move, spinning in tight circles. The circles grew larger until the glowing ball was like a miniature model of the moon, orbiting round and round on the end of the gold chain.

  The circle began to wobble. The circular movement changed to a side-to-side rocking. Incredibly, one side of the movement became more and more pronounced. The orb was defying gravity—it was pointing. It swung toward the sill of one of the two windows that looked out over the front lawn. It stood almost straight out now, pulling at the chain. Like a compass needle, like a divining rod, the globe seemed to be attracted to something, though he couldn’t see anything there at all.

  Lewis took two uncertain steps toward the spot that was attracting the amulet, feeling again the cold, hard wood beneath his feet. If only he had a little more light. He craved light the way a man lost in a desert might crave water. His whole soul thirsted for it.

  He heard a whispery noise behind him—not the sound of drums, not the sound of breathing, but the soft swish of his shoes, slipping across the floor as the door slowly closed itself, cutting off the light from the stairwell.

  Inches away from touching the wall, Lewis stood in tormented indecision. He did not want to be alone in that dark room. Yet he knew he had to follow the glowing orb’s lead, or his mission would be a complete failure.

  Breathing an almost silent prayer, Lewis took another step forward, and another, his left hand holding the chain, his right outstretched to touch the window—

  The chain f
elt different, the tug harder than he remembered.

  Outside the world lay in darkness, except for the glow of a waning moon through the windows to his right and left. And in that glow Lewis saw that someone else was in the room. A hand grasped the chain, pulling it to one side, diverting the sphere from the direction it wanted to take. Lewis felt as if his insides had suddenly turned to ice, and he thought in a panicked way of the fate suffered by Abediah Chadwick.

  Then something in the old, frayed electrical wiring somehow caught. He had left the light switch on, and now electricity started to flow with a barely audible buzzing. Two lightbulbs in a ceiling globe flickered into spectral orange life, weak as a single birthday candle.

  The hand pulling the amulet was slim, a woman’s hand, with pale, oval-shaped nails, a young hand.

  And it floated in midair, unattached to an arm.

  CHAPTER 16

  I CAN’T STAND THIS, ”GRUMBLED Uncle Jonathan.

  “Oh, hush,” snapped Mrs. Zimmermann, though her tone was as worried as Jonathan’s. “It’s not even midnight yet, and my wand isn’t showing the least trace of a warning. Lewis is fine.”

  Rose Rita sat in the backseat of the old Muggins Simoon and wished that she were as sure as Mrs. Zimmermann sounded. She knew Lewis very well, and she admired him in many ways. However, Rose Rita had a level head and a clear way of thinking. She knew that Lewis was likely to panic in sticky situations, and she had often heard his worry-wart mutterings about his many obscure fears and phobias. She practically itched to fly to his aid in some way, even though she knew she couldn’t.

  Her mother and father would have been shocked and alarmed if they had any inkling of what they were up to. The two of them knew that Rose Rita was spending the night with Mrs. Zimmermann—“She needs me to help her with some things,” Rose Rita had said, not untruthfully. They did not know that Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan were on a sort of ghostly stakeout, as the police show Dragnet on TV called this sort of waiting and watching. The old car stood parked in the last curve of the long driveway with its lights out and its engine off. Before them, framed by the black backdrop of the woods, the Hawaii House lay bathed in the pallid light of a waning moon.