Quest Chasers – The Screaming Mummy
Grace and Thomas Lockhaven
Edited by: David Aretha
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An Uninvited Guest
Tommy jolted upright in his bed. There it was again—he heard the floor creak. Someone was there. “Mom? Dad? Is that you?”
He listened intently. Nothing...
Tommy’s eyes widened. Did a shadow just pass under the door?
Tommy could feel the fear—like ice water—filling his veins. His breath came in shallow gasps. He watched in horror as his doorknob began to turn slowly.
“D-d-d-ad?” Tommy urgently half-whispered, half-shouted.
Tommy rolled off his bed onto the floor. He looked around his room. There was no place to hide. He looked at his second-floor window. It was a long drop, but it was the only way out. Tommy threw open the window and kicked out the screen. It fell to the ground with a metallic clang.
A white hand appeared along the edge of his door as it opened, and a skeletal white face with dead black eyes stared back at him. An evil smile stretched across the face of the intruder. Tommy tried to scream but his words got stuck in his throat. His hands clutched the sides of his face as a sinister voice filled his head.
“I told you I would come for you, Tommy. You’ve seen too much.”
Tommy ripped his lamp off the bedside table and hurled it at the intruder. It slammed into his face, the lightbulb shattering into slivers of glass.
As Tommy stepped backward, he could feel the rush of cold air against his neck. The creature rushed toward his prey, his skeletal hands outstretched. Tommy clambered backwards through the window, his fingertips frantically searching for the metal frame. Simultaneously he looked down for a safe place to drop some twenty feet below.
This is going to hurt, Tommy thought, but just as he began his freefall, his right arm jerked painfully upward. He cried out; it felt like his arm was being pulled out of the socket. The creature’s icy-cold grip encircled his wrist—his long black nails tore into his flesh. Tommy ripped and pulled, trying to free his wrist from the creature’s grasp. “Let go of me!” he screamed through gritted teeth.
Tommy dangled in the air, kicking his feet and screaming. The grip on his forearm tightened, and he felt a bone in his wrist beginning to give way. Tears of pain poured out of his eyes. The creature leaned forward, his mouth against Tommy’s cheek. Tommy could feel the hot breath on his skin as the intruder whispered...
“You’re not going anywhere, Tommy.”
Tommy struggled, kicking hard, driving his heels forcefully against the house. Snow and ice rained down on him from the roof, and then he saw it. Glistening in the moonlight, to his left, a long icicle hung from the gutter that ran down the side of his house. Tommy kicked out with all of his might and, while swinging his body to the left, reached out and ripped the icicle off the gutter.
“Enough!” said the creature.
As Tommy kicked and struggled like an insect caught in a spider’s web, he felt himself being pulled back into his room.
Suddenly, the neighbor’s porchlight flashed on. The creature turned his head, and in that split-second, Tommy thrust the icicle into his captor’s forearm. As if in slow motion, Tommy saw the tattered arm of his shirt clutched in the creature’s hand, noticed the surprised look in the creature’s eyes—and then Tommy was falling through space, arms and legs flailing as he crashed into the holly bush below.
Pain filled Tommy’s body as it seemed like a hundred tiny little knives pierced and lacerated his skin. He rolled onto the ground and began screaming, “Mom! Dad!” Puffs of smoke accented every word.
Tommy pulled himself to his feet. His parents’ bedroom light was on, and from outside he could hear the pounding of running feet inside the house. The front door flung open just as Tommy began racing up the front porch steps.
“Dad!” screamed Tommy.
“Tommy, what are you...?” Mr. Prescott’s eyes grew wide as he saw the scrapes and cuts covering Tommy’s face. His son’s mouth was moving but nothing was coming out.
“Tommy, what’s going on?” he said as a wave of confusion and concern filled his face. He pulled Tommy into the doorway. His mother grabbed him. “Tommy, what happened?” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with fear. “Are you OK?”
“Dad,” Tommy managed. “There’s a man...there’s a man in my room! I jumped out the window to escape!”
“Ellie, call the police!” Tommy’s dad said urgently.
Dad quickly spun around, threw open the closet door, and pulled out a baseball bat.
“Dad, he’s huge! Dad, please, just wait for the police! Please, Dad, he might have a gun,” Tommy begged. He knew his dad wasn’t one to back down easily, and the man in his room possessed a strength that wasn’t from this world.
Tommy’s dad hesitated for a moment, his jaw clenched firmly. “OK,” he nodded, and then rushed everyone outside onto the front lawn.
Several neighbors appeared, dressed hurriedly in pajamas and winter coats. They stood on their porches, their faces filled with curiosity and worry.
“Joe,” Mr. Norris, their next-door neighbor, called out as he stepped onto his porch still pulling on his winter coat, “is everything OK?”
“There’s an intruder in our house!” shouted Mr. Prescott. Within seconds, all of the neighbors disappeared behind closed doors, their faces cautiously peeking out their windows. Mr. Norris frantically motioned Tommy’s family over.
“Inside, inside,” said Mr. Norris, holding open the door and motioning them into his house. “Have you called the police?” he asked urgently.
“Yes,” said Tommy’s mom as they rushed into the safety of his house. “They’ll be here any minute.”
Mr. Norris ushered the three into the living room, where they could watch their house safely. Shivers raced through Tommy’s body. He wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or adrenaline.
Tommy withdrew inside his mind. Scattered pieces of conversation danced just on the edge of his consciousness.
Suddenly a terrifying thought hit Tommy. “Eevie,” he whispered aloud.
“Mom,” he said abruptly, “I need your phone!”
Tommy grabbed the phone. His hands trembled as he punched in Eevie’s number. Each ring felt like an eternity.
Tommy walked out of the room and into the hallway by the front door.
Come on, Eevie, answer! Tommy pleaded.
“Tommy?” whispered a sleepy, confused voice. “Wha—”
“Eevie, listen.” Tommy began to shake uncontrollably. “The ranger, he was in my room. He tried to kill me!”
“Tommy, where are you? Are you OK?” Eevie’s panicked voice practically climbed through the airways and shook him by the shoulders.
“I’m safe. I’m with my parents. We’re at Mr. Norris’s house. Listen! Make sure that your house is locked up! Make sure every window and door is locked. If he found me, he’s gonna be able to find you!... Just tell your parents that someone broke into my house! I don’t have my phone, so if you need me, call my mom’s phone.”
Blue lights strobed and spotlights began shining on Tommy’s house. The police had arrived.
“Eevie...,” Tommy whispered. “He’s coming for us!”
Eevie’s words caught in her throat. Her heart pounded again
st her sternum. “I know,” she exhaled. “Be careful.”
“You too, Eevie. I gotta go—the police are here.”
Eevie jumped out of bed and turned on all the lights. Her eyes moved toward her window, half expecting to see the ranger’s black eyes staring back at her. A powerful, numbing rush of fear flooded her body. “Here we go again,” she whispered aloud to herself.
Just a few months earlier, Eevie and Tommy had met the ranger at Black Hallow Park. Dozens of children had vanished over the past century, and a classmate named Drew Morris had nearly been killed by what he described as a very angry, demon-possessed tree.
Hoping to solve the mystery of the disgruntled tree, they found themselves ripped from this world and cast into a deadly cavern filled with savage traps and challenges that were meant to kill them. They survived, and now their favorite evil ranger had been sent to accelerate their demise.
Do I Have Rabies?
Over the next several hours, the police searched the house and questioned Tommy. He drew in a sharp breath when he saw his ragged shirt sleeve laying on top of his pillow.
Tommy explained how he had thrown open the window and crawled out, and the intruder had grabbed his arm just as he had let go. The forensic team took pictures of his arm where the nails of the intruder had dug into his flesh. A row of angry, purple welts dotted his wrist.
A heavyset policeman with a shock of black hair and bright red cheeks pointed at Tommy’s arm. “Are those from his fingernails?” he asked in disbelief. He gently turned Tommy’s arm over for a better view. “Make sure you are up-to-date on your tetanus shots.” Tommy nodded and then looked down at his battered arm. Tetanus...more like rabies.
Tommy’s father stood silently, his mouth drawn tight as he listened to the description of what had happened. A forensic investigator dressed in a white protective jumpsuit and blue latex gloves was on his knees, taking pictures of black splotches that went from the windowsill onto Tommy’s floor.
“Did the intruder have some kind of liquid?” asked the investigator as he looked up at Tommy.
“No, sir. I stabbed him in the arm with an icicle. It...it must be his blood.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tommy noticed his father’s knees buckle and his face go pale. His father knew something!
Tommy turned his head back to the investigator, who said, “I don’t think it’s his blood. It seems to be some type of acid, you see?” He pointed to the floor. “It’s begun to eat into the wood.”
“I didn’t see anything, sir. I stabbed him with the icicle and he screamed and let me go. I never saw anything else in his hands.”
The investigator pulled out a device with a razor attached to it and scraped the black, hardened liquid into a sample bag.
He stood and looked at Tommy, giving him a don’t worry look. “We’ll send this to the lab. They’ll be able to tell us what it is.”
The lead officer turned toward Tommy’s dad. “Your son was extremely brave and lucky, Mr. Prescott. We’ll leave a cruiser here tonight to watch over things, and we’ll make sure we add some additional patrols over the next week until we catch this guy. If you hear or see anything suspicious, call us right away.”
“Thank you,” said Tommy. His own voice sounded so strange, so disconnected.
Mr. Prescott’s mind seemed to be somewhere else as well—somewhere far, far away.
Eevie Makes a Wand-erful Discovery
It was Friday night...well, Saturday morning. Eevie sat at her desk, unable to sleep. Every time her eyes closed, she immediately began to see the ranger’s face, his eyes completely black, filled with evil, staring into hers.... She bolted upright, slamming her knees into the underside of her desk. She shook her head and blinked to clear her eyes. I must have drifted off.
She wiped a strand of drool from her cheek and glanced at her phone. It was 12:14 a.m. A silvery swath of moonlight stretched across her desk to her bed, illuminating the globe that her grandfather had left her when he died. A wisp of moonlight flickered across the surface of the globe as branches outside her window danced in the wind.
Eevie rested her elbows on the desk and cupped her chin in her hands. She felt her mind drifting away again, and somewhere between awake and asleep, a delicate thought kept bubbling to the surface of her consciousness, only to pop away when she became slightly aware of it. “Crypticus...”
Eevie shook her head and stared at her globe. “Crypticus,” she whispered out loud. I’ve never heard of Crypticus.
She raised the lid of her laptop and typed C-r-y-p-t-i-c-u-s. Google returned 82,000 results. The first result was a death metal band, named Crypticus. Well, that’s not gonna work, unless Grandpa was head-banger and never told me.
She changed her strategy and brought up a map of Europe.
She took a look at the globe for reference and then slowly traced her finger down the screen. There’s Italy, Malta...and then the Mediterranean Sea. She looked at the globe again. It should be right here.
She opened a dozen European maps, but Crypticus didn’t appear on any of them.
Eevie, fully awake now, looked closer at the strange country. She gently ran her fingers over the surface. Did she feel a small ridge? She placed her nail along the border of Crypticus, and ever so gently pulled. The entire island began to pull away from the globe. She pulled the piece off and began to examine it. She turned it over. She recognized her grandfather’s shaky handwriting. It read, Hide-and-seek > 9th board > knot. I know you will find the answer. Love, Grandpa.
Eevie’s hands shook with excitement. A secret message from her grandpa! She reread the message one more time. She used to love playing hide-and-seek with her grandfather. Her mind immediately filled with images of when she was a little girl hiding from her grandfather. Eevie bolted upright in her chair. She knew exactly where he wanted her to go.
Turning her iPhone to flashlight, she quietly crept through the hallway past her parents’ bedroom, down the stairs, to the basement. Slowly, she opened the door at the bottom of the steps. Stale air filled her lungs as she walked into the playroom. The light from her phone danced across a dusty old ping-pong table whose net was now more spider web than net. The light moved over to the giant, rust-colored sectional sofa where she used to hide, and her mind flooded with vivid memories of her grandfather’s voice calling and searching for her. Her heart filled with melancholy and excitement simultaneously.
Eevie shone the light on the wall. Strips of stained, knotted pine paneling stretched to the ceiling. She buried her face into the crook of her arm, muffling a sneeze. This room is in serious need of an extreme makeover...and Febreze.
Eevie began counting the panels, moving the light from board to board: seven, eight, nine. She stopped at the ninth board. Just above eye level a huge knot beckoned to her. There it is! Eevie’s heart was pounding. As quietly as she could manage, she pulled part of the sectional sofa away from the wall. A large house spider scurried over her foot. Eevie jumped back, stifling a gasp. Not cool, Mr. Spider.
Eevie put her fingers on the knot. Immediately she felt some give as the top dipped inward. She pressed a little harder and the knot fell into the space behind the board. Standing on her toes, she raised the light and tried to peer down into the hole. Nothing. She slid her fingers into the hole, slowly feeling as she walked her fingers downward.
Eevie’s fingers touched something metallic—some sort of latch! She pulled upwards. There was a click, and just like that, the board swung open like a miniature door. Eevie moved the light up and down the length of the opening. At the bottom of the doorway lay a cloth satchel. She crouched down and slowly grabbed the bag. She could tell by its weight that something was definitely inside.
Eevie couldn’t stand it. She had to find out what was inside the satchel, but not here. She peered inside the empty doorway. There it is, she thought as she picked up the knot that had fallen inside the doorway and carefully placed it back where it belonged. Then, eve
r so cautiously, she closed the door. A soft metallic click let her know that it was securely locked into place.
Eevie crept silently back to her room. Her heart beat wildly as if she were auditioning as a drummer in a rock band. Slowly she closed her door, and ever so quietly she locked it. She lay the satchel on her bed and then listened for a full minute. The only sound she could hear was the wind blowing through the naked branches of the oak tree outside her window.
Eevie flicked on her bedroom light and took a closer look at the satchel. The flap of the satchel was actually closed by two leather straps secured by two brass buckles. Eevie unclasped each buckle and guardedly pulled back the flap. She gingerly lifted the satchel from the bottom and poured the contents onto her bed.
The contents were wrapped in cloth and bound by prickly sisal string. There was a folded piece of paper under the string. Eevie’s hands trembled as she carefully removed the paper. Once again, an elixir of sadness and excitement coursed through her body as she saw her grandfather’s handwriting.
Eevie, I knew you would solve the puzzle. My heart is filled with so many wonderful memories spent with you. Inside this package you will find everything that you need. I’m sorry I cannot explain more here, in case this package were to fall into the wrong hands. The clues are within, and you will need to use all of the resources available to you to figure them out. Now, I humbly pass on my quest to you. I know you will find a way to put an end to this.
I love you. Grandpa.
P.S. Pam will be there to help guide you.
Eevie shook her head as a tear slowly journeyed down her cheek. “I love you too, Grandpa,” she whispered out loud. She read the last line of the letter again. Grandpa...who is Pam?
Eevie grabbed scissors from her desk and cut through the cord. Did he mean Pam from my mom’s book club? Because she rides a golf cart to the end of the driveway just to get her mail.
She opened the cloth, revealing some old newspaper clippings rolled into a tube and held together by two dry-rotted rubber bands. There also was a book with a cracked leather cover that looked to be hundreds of years old. Tiny flecks of gold were all that remained of the letters that had been burned into the cover.
Quest Chasers: The Screaming Mummy (A Magic Fantasy Adventure Book Series) Page 1
