The Headless Cupid

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  So David was right behind Mr. Golanski, all loaded down with tools and wire, when they got to the foot of the stairs—and stopped. Mr. Golanski put his hand on the first newel post, on the ball held by the first two cupids, and stood still looking up and down and up and down the stairs. David waited until his arms began to get tired, and then he tried to edge past to go on up.

  “I’ll just take these things on up—” he said, but Mr. Golanski put out his arm so David couldn’t get by.

  “My father’s work,” he said. “This banister was carved by my father when I was a very small boy.”

  “Your father?” David said. “Wow! He must have been a great carver. My dad says they’re really great banisters. He says he’s never seen anything like them in this country.”

  Just then Amanda came in the front door carrying her book, and David told her about Mr. Golanski’s father and the banisters.

  Amanda stopped to listen, looking bored as usual, and Mr. Golanski went on telling how his father had come to America to get land and be a farmer because there wasn’t much work anymore for woodcarvers, which is what he was. Then he had met Mr. Westerly and Mr. Westerly had brought him and his family to Steven’s Corners and helped him find land and a job. And when Mr. Westerly started building his new house, Mr. Golanski’s father had carved the banisters to show his appreciation.

  “Wow,” David said. “That was really a great thing for him to do. These banisters are really a work of art. That’s what my dad says.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Golanski said. “A work of art. True. But they are in need of refinishing. Someday I will come back and do that. You may tell your father that I will come. I will make them like new again. Except for the cherub on the landing who was damaged by the poltergeist. I cannot replace the head.”

  David would hardly have paid any attention to the word “poltergeist” because he’d never heard it before; but the moment Mr. Golanski said it Amanda snapped to attention as if he’d just fired off a cannon.

  “Poltergeist?” she said. “What poltergeist?”

  Mr. Golanski gave her his long dark look. “Ah,” he said. “You know about poltergeist, then? Yes, I am not surprised.”

  “What about a poltergeist, Mr. Golanski?” Amanda said in an unnaturally polite and eager voice. “Was there a poltergeist in this house once?”

  “Yes. Yes, there was. It was only a short time after the banisters were finished. A great fuss it was—in all the papers for weeks. With the village full of policemen and professors.”

  “Was there—were there any children living here then?” Amanda asked. “Were there any boys or girls in the house then?”

  Mr. Golanski turned away from where he had been inspecting a crackled place in the varnish on the banisters and looked again for a long time at Amanda before he answered. Then he said, “Yes, you know a great deal about such things. You know too much, perhaps.” Then he turned and motioning to David to follow, he went on up the stairs. Amanda followed close behind.

  When Mr. Golanski had started to take apart the switch in the upstairs hall, she began to ask some more questions. She asked about the children who had lived in Westerly House and what kinds of things had happened, but she didn’t get any more answers. It was almost as if Mr. Golanski had suddenly gone deaf. Only once when she asked about the cupid without the head, he stopped working and turned toward her.

  “Ahh,” he said. “The cupid. It was cut off one night when there was much damage and disturbance in the house. The Westerlys wanted my father to carve another head to replace it, but he refused. He felt it would be better if they found the missing head. He felt sure it could be found.”

  By that time David was getting wild with curiosity, and it was obvious that Amanda was, too; but Mr. Golanski refused to say anymore. Amanda kept trying, asking all sorts of questions, until Mr. Golanski finally whirled around at her with his bushy white eyebrows drawn together and his wrinkles drawn into angry gulches up and down his face. He waved his arm at her fiercely and said, “Go now. I am busy,” and Amanda went.

  David was holding the end of a measuring tape for Mr. Golanski or he would have gone too. He did go soon afterwards, and in the meantime he didn’t ask any more questions. When he finally got away, Amanda was waiting for him on the front porch.

  She was looking so excited and enthusiastic that, for a second, David hardly recognized her.

  “Isn’t that fantastic,” she said. “A poltergeist, right here in this house.”

  “Look,” David said, “would you mind telling me what a poltergeist is? I mean exactly. I have a general idea but—”

  But Amanda wasn’t paying any attention to him at all. She went right on talking almost as if she were talking to herself.

  “That means this is a real haunted house. Probably even a famous haunted house—or at least it was once.”

  “It’s some kind of a ghost, isn’t it?” David went on asking. “But why is it called a ‘poltergeist’?”

  All of a sudden Amanda seemed to notice him.

  “Don’t you know what a poltergeist is?” she asked. “It’s a ghost, but it’s a particular kind of ghost. Polter means noisy, and geist means spirit. So poltergeist means noisy ghost. There’ve been a lot of very famous ones. They’ve been studied by scientists and detectives and people like that!”

  “How do you know all that?” David asked.

  “Oh, I’ve read about them lots of times, and Leah knows all about them, too.” Amanda thought for a while before she went on slowly, as if she were trying to remember. “They always make lots of noise and throw things. Rocks usually but other stuff, too. They move things around when no one is near them, and they play tricks on people. And there’s another strange thing about them.”

  “What’s that?” David asked.

  “When they appear it’s almost always in a house where there are children of a certain age.”

  “What age?” David asked.

  Amanda turned towards him but she didn’t seem to be looking at him. “About my age,” she said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN MOLLY MADE A QUICK TRIP INTO THE CITY TO deliver some paintings, Amanda went with her. When Molly came back, she was alone.

  “Where’s Amanda?” David asked.

  “At the library,” Molly said. “She’s going to come home on the bus.”

  “Still at the library?” David asked. “I thought she was going there this morning.”

  “She did. But when I went to pick her up, she insisted she had to stay longer; so we found out about bus connections, and she’s going to catch the 2:00 bus. It comes through Steven’s Corners about 3:00.”

  Before she left that morning Amanda had told David she was going to the library to do research on poltergeists. There hadn’t been much time to discuss it, and all morning David had been wondering what she thought she was going to find out, because it seemed to him that she already knew everything there was to know about poltergeists. The more he thought about it, the more curious he got; and by afternoon he decided to walk down to the bus stop to meet her.

  The bus stop at Steven’s Corners was on the other side of the village where the city road came through. It was quite a long way, particularly in the afternoon heat of a dusty August day. By the time David got to the little three-sided bus stop shelter, his face was damp with sweat and gritty with dust. He was sitting there feeling very tired and hot when the bus pulled up and Amanda got off, looking extremely cool. Of course the bus was air-conditioned, but Amanda’s cool was the kind that said that she hadn’t noticed that people on the bus were staring at her far-out rummage store outfit and the Center-of-Power triangle on her forehead. Amanda’s expression said that she didn’t have any idea people were staring, and even if she did, it would only bore her. She went on looking bored until the bus pulled away and she noticed David.

  “David,” she said, rushing over to him, “wait till you hear what I found out.”

  “About poltergeist
s?” David asked.

  “About the poltergeist. The one that was in Westerly House.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Well, I remembered that the house was built in 1895, and the old man said the poltergeist started not long after the house was built. So I asked to see the files of all the old local newspapers starting with 1895. They weren’t going to let me because I’m not an adult, but finally they did, after I told them it was for a summer school project. Only they kept snooping to see that I didn’t cut out anything. But I found it finally, starting in September of 1896.”

  On the way back to the house David didn’t even notice the heat and the dust, because Amanda was telling him a fantastic story about what had happened in Westerly House. The two old ladies who had lived in the house until just a few months before the Stanleys had bought it were young girls at the time, just twelve and fourteen years old. Their names were Mabel and Harriette, and before they came to Steven’s Corners, they had lived all over the world. Their father, Mr. Westerly, had worked for the government and had been sent to all different countries. But then he had come to Steven’s Corners to retire and be a farmer; and not long after the family moved in, the trouble had started.

  At first it was mostly rocks. Rocks and pebbles were thrown all around the house and yard—sometimes one or two at a time, and sometimes almost in showers. Then there began to be noises at night, and large pieces of furniture would be moved all around the house. The police were called in when things began to be broken, vases and lamps and window panes. One newspaper had an interview with a maid who lived in the house at the time, and who claimed to have seen a large cut-glass lamp pick itself up and dash itself to pieces on the opposite wall of the room. There were accounts in the papers about special investigators, and even a couple of professors from a university, who had come to Steven’s Corners to study the strange happenings at Westerly House.

  “Did they ever solve it?” David asked. “I mean, did they ever find out who was doing it?”

  “No,” Amanda said. “No, they never found out. There was an article in the paper by one of the professors, who claimed that Harriette, the oldest Westerly girl, was probably responsible, but he didn’t have any proof at all. They did find out that the things only happened when the girls were in the house, but that doesn’t mean they did them. The spirit had to have a person to take power from, and that person happened to be Harriette. One time, the time the front window was broken and the cupid’s head was chopped off, Harriette was in bed in her room asleep with three people watching her when it happened. So that was proof that she didn’t do it.”

  “What did they do then?”

  “Well, then the mother sent for a famous medium, a person who calls up spirits, to come to the house. And the woman came and said that the house had an evil spirit in it and there would have to be a special ceremony to get rid of it. But the father, Mr. Westerly, sent the girls away to a boarding school, and everything stopped. So they never had the ceremony after all.”

  “Wow!” David said. “I wonder why they didn’t tell us all that stuff before we bought the house. They probably thought we’d be afraid to buy it.”

  “Or else they just didn’t know about it,” Amanda said. “It happened such a long time ago, and most of the people who knew about it have probably already died or moved away.”

  “I wish Dad were here,” David said.

  “Why?” Amanda asked.

  “Because he’d really be interested. I mean it was practically an historical event—in the papers and everything. And right in our own house.”

  Amanda had stopped walking and was looking at David. All she said was “Davie!” but the way she said it and the look told him exactly what she meant.

  “Look, Amanda,” he said, “I don’t get it. I don’t see why I can’t tell my dad about this. He’d really be interested, and it’s not as if it were some big secret. I mean, it was in the papers and everyone knew about it.”

  “Everybody knew about it then. But not now.”

  “You mean you’re not even going to tell Molly?”

  “Tell Molly! Are you crazy? You know what a chicken she is. She’d probably refuse to stay in the house another night.”

  David hadn’t thought of that possibility. Under the circumstances, it was probably best if he didn’t tell Dad or Molly, but it really was too bad. It was such a great thing to tell, and now there was no one to tell it to except the kids, and they were too young to appreciate it.

  As soon as they got back to Westerly House, Amanda shut herself in her room and stayed there that night and most of the next day except at mealtime. David was dying to talk to her, and once or twice he even knocked on her door, but she only yelled at him to go away because she was busy. It was very frustrating.

  The more David thought about the poltergeist, and the things Amanda had told him about it, the more interesting ideas and questions kept coming to his mind.

  He wanted to know which rooms the rocks fell in, and which wall the lamp had smashed against. And which room had been Harriette’s room, where she lay asleep with people watching her while the poltergeist banged through the downstairs part of the house, breaking windows and chopping off the head of the cupid.

  He wondered if it could have been his room. The very room he was sitting in. He got up and walked around trying to picture it the way it might have been then: where Harriette’s bed had been, probably an old-fashioned bed with a canopy on top, and where the watchers sat, and what they had done when the noises started downstairs, slowly and softly maybe at first, and then louder and louder—

  Just at that moment there was a bang from somewhere nearby, and David jumped about a foot before he realized the sound had come from the girls’ room. It was probably only Janie having a tantrum about something. He started down the hall to tell her to stop, but on the way he knocked again on Amanda’s door. The only answer was a voice saying, “Go away. I’m thinking.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  IT WASN’T UNTIL LATE IN THE AFTERNOON THAT AMANDA FINALLY CAME OUT of her room. The kids were running around the lawn in their bathing suits, and David was watering the garden and the kids at the same time. It was another bright hot day, and Amanda stood on the front steps and looked around with her eyes squinched up, as if she were just coming out of the dark. When she saw David, she came over to him, skirting around the lawn and the splashing squealing kids.

  “Come on,” she said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Go ahead,” David said, “talk.”

  “Not here.”

  “Well, okay. In a minute. I can’t quit now. I told them I’d hold the sprinkler for them, and they’ve just gotten started.”

  “Let them hold it themselves.”

  David shook his head. “Huh-uh,” he said. “Dad said not to let them anymore. The last time they washed out two rose bushes and nearly drowned Esther.”

  Amanda sighed and started off disgustedly, but after a few steps she came back.

  “Well, all right. We’ll talk here, if we can hear each other. I wanted to tell you about the seance. It has to be tonight.”

  “Why tonight? I thought we were going to wait until Thursday night when Molly goes to her meeting.”

  “It has to be tonight,” Amanda said. “I’ve been studying up, consulting the signs and omens. The signs are for tonight. We’ll have to have it late, after Molly goes to bed.”

  “After Molly goes to bed? Wow! She never goes to bed until ten or eleven. Blair and Esther have never stayed up that late. They’d conk out for sure.”

  “Well, put them to bed at the regular time and then get them up again about midnight. That’s the best time for a seance anyway.”

  David argued a little more, and even suggested that the seance be held without the kids, or at least without Blair and Esther; but Amanda wouldn’t agree. She argued that a seance needed at least five people, in order to make their fingers touch when their hands were spread out on the table in fro
nt of them.

  So David agreed doubtfully, and Amanda disappeared back into the house. David went on sprinkling the kids, and as he sprinkled, he worried a little about the seance; but at least he had one thing to be glad about. He was glad he hadn’t gotten around to telling the kids about the poltergeist. If he had to get them up and take them to a seance in the middle of the night, he was just as glad they hadn’t found out the house was haunted, or had been once. Finding out about a seance and a poltergeist all at once was enough to make anyone a little nervous, even a person a lot older than the kids were.

  David had explained seances to the kids before; but when he told them about the one planned for that night, Esther had to know all over again just exactly what a seance was.

  “I told you all about it,” David said. “It’s where you all sit down around a table in a dark room, and one of the people at the table is the medium. The medium goes into a trance and summons a spirit. Then the spirit talks to you or makes signals like making the table leg thump once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no.’ Sometimes you can even see the spirit, but not always.”

  “Who’s going to get to be the medium?” Janie asked.

  “Amanda.”

  “Why does Amanda always get to be everything? Why can’t I be? I’m a lot more medium than she is.”

  “What do you mean, you’re a lot more medium?”

  “You and Amanda are biggest and Blair and Tesser are little, so I’m the medium.”

  David groaned. “That’s an entirely different thing. This kind of medium is a person who has a special talent for contacting spirits. Not very many people can do it.”

  “Can Amanda do it?”

  “She thinks she can. She said she hasn’t had a chance to try in a real seance. But she’s seen other people do it, and she knows how. She says she’s been practicing for a long time. So if you’re going to make a fuss about getting to be the medium, Janie, I’m just not even going to wake you up to go.”