The Headless Cupid

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  When he finally made it to the foot of the stairs, he found himself in the midst of a floor full of rocks—pebbles mostly, but some larger ones. As he bent to pick one up, David heard a sound behind him and whirled to find Amanda standing a foot or two away. Her hands were clasped in front of her mouth, and her eyes looked like owl eyes, round and unblinking. David stared at her, but this time she didn’t stare back. Instead she leaned to peer around him up the stairs.

  “What’s that?” she asked in a thin unnatural voice.

  David looked where she was pointing. The object was balanced on the edge of a stair, fairly near the bottom of the flight. David climbed, picking his way among rocks, and picked it up. When he turned to show it to Amanda, she was so close behind him that he nearly hit her with it.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked again.

  “I was about to ask you,” David said pointedly. But Amanda didn’t seem to get the point.

  “I—I don’t know,” she said, staring at the thing in David’s hands.

  Watching her, David couldn’t help being impressed with her acting ability. She really did look and act frightened. Turning his attention to the object in his hands, David decided that it must be the insides of some kind of clock or mechanical toy. Whatever it was, it was very old and rusty and covered with dust.

  “There’s something else,” Amanda whispered.

  A few steps farther up David picked up what seemed to be a very large slingshot. Like the wind-up machinery, it had a dusty feel to it, and the wide strip of elastic that hung from one of the prongs was limp and rotten. Holding the dusty slingshot, David felt a strange prickling sensation at the back of his neck, and he turned and peered on up the stairs. The upstairs hall light was off so it was very shadowy on the landing, but he could see something else sitting there, something large and dark.

  The object on the landing turned out to be a box. A wooden box, long and narrow, and strongly made. As David reached the landing with Amanda right beside him, he could see that the box was on its side and scattered around it were many more rocks and pebbles. Most of the rocks were very small, but there seemed to be one that was much larger.

  The larger object was roughly round, and in the dim light David was sure it was only a larger rock—until he had it in his hand. But then he saw that it wasn’t a rock at all. It was a head, the carved and varnished head of a wooden cupid.

  Chapter Eighteen

  DAVID AND AMANDA BOTH STOOD STARING AT THE CUPID’S HEAD IN David’s hands for several seconds before David put it down on the landing and wiped his hands. His hands were grainy with dust, and his neck and back were crawly with nervousness, even though he knew, or almost knew, that Amanda had done the whole thing—somehow.

  He looked at Amanda, but she was busy looking all around her, turning and peering with quick jerky movements. She looked up and down the stairs, over the banisters into the hall below, and up along the edge of the stairwell over their heads. When her eyes finally came back to David, they had a puckered look at the corners, almost as if she were going to cry.

  “What are we going to do, David?” she said in a voice that sounded almost like a wail.

  David opened his mouth, but he was so puzzled that nothing came out. He knew that Amanda must have done it—but he really didn’t see how she could have. How could she have gotten back into the kitchen in time to scream there, almost before the rocks had stopped bouncing down the stairs? He knew, though, how smart and tricky she was, and he could almost believe that she’d found a way. What was getting harder and harder to believe was that she could do such an absolutely great job of pretending to be scared half out of her wits.

  Suddenly Amanda grabbed his arm and said, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get back where it’s lighter, in the living room.”

  When they got to the living room, Amanda decided the kitchen might be better, but then she decided on the living room again—and they wound up sitting on the couch. David sat at one end, and Amanda sat very close to him.

  “David,” Amanda said suddenly, “please tell me the truth. You didn’t do it, did you? I guess you couldn’t have really. You were right here in the living room, and I’d only been gone a minute when it happened. I guess you couldn’t have. But did you, David? Please tell me if you did.”

  “No,” David said. “I didn’t do it. Did you?”

  “No-o-o,” Amanda said, wailing again. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t! Not this time.”

  “Not this time?”

  Amanda looked startled for a minute, but then she nodded. “I did the rest of it. All the rest of it. But I didn’t do what happened tonight. I didn’t.”

  David had a strange feeling that Amanda was telling the truth. And along with it, he had an even stranger feeling that he’d known it all along. That crawly feeling on the back of his neck hadn’t been for nothing.

  “Wow!” David said softly.

  “I’m scared,” Amanda said. “I wish Mom and Ingrid would get here. David, aren’t you scared?”

  “Sure,” David said. “I’m scared.”

  “You don’t seem scared,” Amanda said in a chattery voice. “Out there, on the stairs, you didn’t seem scared at all.”

  It flashed in David’s mind to say that he hadn’t been scared then because he already knew that Amanda had done the rest of it and he was still halfway sure she’d done the new thing, too. But he didn’t say it. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t, except that having Amanda think he was brave somehow made him feel braver. And he had a feeling that he might need all the bravery he could get before Molly got back.

  For an eternity—that probably lasted not more than twenty minutes—David and Amanda huddled together on the couch and talked in whispers about all the stuff on the stairs, and the cupid’s head, and the poltergeist.

  The head had been missing since the time the poltergeist had taken it, years and years before. No one had seen it in all that time. And suddenly it was back. It had come back and with it had come hundreds of rocks, and some old junk and, weirdest of all, the dust. On the head itself, and in the box, and all over the landing there was dust. Not outdoorsy, earthy dust, but old moldy smelling dust, the kind you might find in ancient deserted places closed off from air and life.

  But wherever it had come from, the head was back, and something had to have brought it. And it really looked as if that something was the poltergeist.

  It was Amanda who brought up the question of why. If the poltergeist had come back to Westerly House, after all that time, why had it come? As soon as she asked, she stopped and stared at David, and David knew what she was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing. He was wondering if the poltergeist had come back because Amanda had been impersonating it. Perhaps it hadn’t liked Amanda pretending to be it. It was a frightening thought, even to David, and Amanda looked positively sick with terror.

  They stopped talking then and sat quietly watching and listening. The house was perfectly silent. After a while David began to relax a little, and he wanted to ask Amanda some questions about how she had done the other poltergeist things; but looking at her pale, tight face, he decided she wasn’t in the mood to talk about it.

  Amanda and David were still crouching quietly in the corner of the couch when they heard the sound of Molly’s car in the driveway. Nothing in the world ever sounded so good.

  “They’re home,” they said to each other, and made a dash for the garage. They were halfway through the story before Molly and Ingrid were clear out of the car. Of course they had to go back over it several times before the women began to understand what they were talking about. When they did, Molly put her arms around Amanda and said, “Oh dear, I was so afraid something like this would happen.”

  The next thing Molly did was to rush upstairs with the rest of them right behind her to check on the little kids. All three of them were sleeping peacefully. On their way back down the stairs, Molly and Ingrid carefully inspected the mess on the stairs. When they were all back dow
n in the living room, Ingrid started asking a million questions.

  Ingrid was large and blond and perfectly logical. She even looked logical, as if she’d been planned with a slide rule. Her favorite expression was “it follows,” and it was evident that if something didn’t “follow” logically she didn’t have a bit of respect for it. It was also obvious that a real ghost didn’t logically follow any ideas or experiences that Ingrid had ever had. Ingrid suspected somebody human, like David or Amanda, or both.

  Ingrid’s suspicions had a strange effect on Amanda. As soon as Ingrid started asking suspicious questions, the color began to come back into Amanda’s face and her lips quit shaking and began to curl downward in her upside-down smile. She clearly didn’t intend to tell Ingrid anything, and David went along with it. If Amanda wanted to wait for another time to tell about the part she had played in the other poltergeist manifestations, it was all right with him. Besides, there was something about the way Ingrid obviously didn’t believe a word you were saying when you were telling the truth that made you almost want to lie to her.

  If Ingrid didn’t believe anything David and Amanda said, Molly seemed to be believing all of it. She sat next to Amanda on the couch, looking as jumpy and shaky as Amanda had before Ingrid got her mad.

  When Ingrid finally decided to postpone the rest of the third degree until the next morning, David offered to help her clean up the mess on the stairs. So Amanda stayed in the living room with Molly while David and Ingrid picked up all the rocks and other things and put them in the wooden box. Back on the landing among the rocks and the moldy dust, David was almost glad for Ingrid’s company. In a situation like that, you couldn’t help appreciating a person who never had believed in ghosts and never would believe in ghosts, no matter what happened.

  When all the rocks were in the box, David picked up the cupid’s head and dusted it off.

  “I want to keep this,” he said.

  When Ingrid asked him why, in the tone of voice a cop might use to ask a guy at the bank teller’s window why he was wearing a mask, David just shrugged. “I just want to keep it in my room,” he said.

  “Where have you been keeping it?” she asked.

  David shook his head at her, slowly. “I haven’t,” he said—but she didn’t believe it. David could see that nothing he could say would make any difference, so he didn’t try. Besides, he wasn’t too sure himself why he wanted the cupid’s head. Except that he had thought about putting it back where it came from. That headless cupid had always bothered him a little, and he liked the idea of giving it back its head after all those years without it.

  Molly and Amanda were still sitting on the couch, talking, but they suddenly got quiet when David and Ingrid came back into the room. David was curious about what they’d been discussing because he sensed a difference. He couldn’t put his finger on anything, but the difference was there all right, so strong David could almost feel it in the air around them.

  Ingrid slept in Amanda’s room that night, and Amanda spent the night in her mother’s room. That was different, too. David was so curious that a while later, when he was on his way to the bathroom, he stopped for a minute outside the door of Molly’s room. He wasn’t really eavesdropping because he couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could hear them talking and talking, as if they were going to keep it up for half the night.

  Back in his own room, David lay awake for a long time. He thought about Amanda and her mother still talking in the next room. Probably making more conversation in one night than they’d done in the last year or two. He also thought about the cupid’s head, just a few feet away in the top drawer of his dresser. Then he thought about the things on the stairs and wondered again who had put them there—and came to the same conclusion as before. There just wasn’t any logical way to explain it, no matter what Ingrid said.

  But somehow, the idea didn’t scare him very much. Maybe you could get used to the idea of living with a ghost, and once you were used to it, it didn’t scare you anymore. David wondered if that were true.

  As a test he pictured to himself the door of his room opening silently and then his underwear drawer sliding slowly out, pulled by an unseen hand, as the poltergeist returned to claim its head. David raised up on one elbow and pictured the whole thing very clearly. In the dim moonlight that flooded his room, it wasn’t a difficult thing to do.

  He decided it must be true, all right, about getting used to ghosts. No matter how realistically he pictured the poltergeist, nothing crawled at the back of his neck. In fact, after a while he grinned in the direction of the dresser drawer.

  “Okay, poltergeist,” he said out loud. “You had it first. It’s on the right side, just behind the socks.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE NEXT MORNING THE CUPID’S HEAD WAS STILL THERE, ON THE RIGHT HAND side, behind the socks. If it hadn’t been there, David might have had a hard time believing that the whole thing had happened at all. For one thing, it was the kind of clear bright day that makes everything look very solid and sharply defined and unmysterious. The kind of day that makes you wonder how on earth you could even have imagined the weird stuff you believed in at midnight.

  Another thing that made the night before hard to believe was Ingrid. Ingrid was up early that morning, taking charge of everything. It’s not easy to take charge of what other people believe or don’t believe, but if anyone could do it, Ingrid could. Watching Ingrid bustling around the house, David found himself definitely leaning toward a logical explanation for what had happened the night before. Not that he had one. He just found himself looking in directions where one might be.

  Of course, the best direction was still Amanda. David found himself watching Amanda very closely. At breakfast she was very quiet as usual, but David still sensed a difference about her. At least he did until Ingrid started asking questions again and Amanda’s guard went up as cool and hard as ever.

  Ingrid asked a lot of questions. All the ones she asked the night before, and a lot of new ones. Some of the new ones were about Janie and the twins, who hadn’t yet come downstairs to breakfast. Ingrid wanted to know how long the kids had been in bed before the stuff was thrown downstairs, and where they’d been when some of the other poltergeist things had happened.

  When Molly saw what Ingrid was driving at, she shook her head. “They couldn’t have had anything to do with it, Ingrid,” she said. “They’re too little. I don’t think we ought to mention it to them at all. They’ve had too many upsetting events in their lives lately. I’m just glad they all slept through it last night.”

  Ingrid didn’t agree but she finally promised not to mention it to the twins, at least, but she still thought she ought to question Janie. Molly and Ingrid were still arguing about Janie, when Amanda excused herself and went out the back door. After a minute David followed her. She was sitting on the back steps in the morning sun. David sat down beside her.

  The sun was warm on the steps, but the air still had the night-freshened cool of summer mornings. Amanda and David sat there looking at the ground and not saying anything. The ground was dry and bare by the back steps, and not all that interesting, but the questions David had in mind weren’t easy to get started on, so he studied the ground instead. Amanda seemed to be doing the same thing. David was beginning to think they might sit there all morning when an ant crawled by carrying a dead beetle about three times his size. David and Amanda both looked at the ant.

  “Wow,” they both said at once.

  After they’d both said something about “how on earth did it carry something so much heavier than it was,” David turned to Amanda and said, “How—” and before he could ask any more she answered.

  “I kind of rolled it,” she said. “You remember how the planter was kind of rounded at the bottom? Well, if you tipped it a little, it was easy to make it roll along halfway on its side. I just rolled it to the top of the stairs and let it go.”

  David nodded, “And then you ran back to bed—”<
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  “And pretended to be asleep,” Amanda said. “I’m very good at pretending to be asleep.” She made a puckered, light-blinded face, like someone who had just been jarred awake.

  “And the other time, when the picture was smashed?”

  “I just threw that crystal thing at it and ran. It takes people a minute to wake up and get started moving no matter what wakes them up. I had my flashlight to see by, so I didn’t have to stop to turn lights on and off. I’d only been back in bed about two seconds when Mom ran in. That was a close one.”

  “How about all the rocks?” David asked.

  “Most of those were easy. I gathered them down in the creek bed and stored them in the loft of the garage. Then I’d carry them in my pockets until I needed them. Some of them I just left scattered around, and most of the flying ones I threw from the landing. From the landing you can get a clear shot at four different doors of downstairs rooms. Did you know that?”

  “No,” David said. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it. At least not as a place to throw things from.” He had thought about the landing as being a place where you could sit and tune in on the rest of the house. But what he’d felt was that the rest of the house was “in touch with” the landing—not “in range of.”

  “That time at the table—” Amanda went on, “the time the milk pitcher broke—”

  “Yeah,” David said, “I couldn’t figure out how you did that one.”

  “I just brought a big rock to the table in my pocket, and then I got it ready in my lap and waited for something to distract every-one’s attention away from me.”

  “Hey, I remember. The water heater was making noises.”

  Amanda nodded. “And when everyone looked at it, I just gave the rock a little toss up into the air and it came down right on the table. I really got that idea from you.”