The Final Nightmare

by Rodman Philbrick

  The door swung open.

  6

  A big dark shape filled the doorway, blotting out the sun.

  “Jason? Is that you?”

  I turned to jelly with relief. It was only Steve, my bud from next door.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “How come your parents are back already?”

  I shrugged. “The job didn’t take as long as they thought, that’s all.”

  “Yeah?” He sounded doubtful. “What was all the fuss over here late last night? I thought I heard screaming.”

  “Must have been the ambulance siren,” I said, acting casual. Like it was no big deal.

  “The ambulance? Cool! What happened?”

  As I told Steve about our horrible night, with the ghosts chasing us up into the attic and out onto the roof, his eyes got bigger and bigger.

  “You’re making it up,” he said. “The baby-sitter really broke her arm?”

  I nodded. “She’s okay now.”

  “So you guys were left here on your own?”

  “Only for a little while,” I said. “Then my parents came back. The witch-thing is still here, though. She just came after me with a sledgehammer. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  Steve was kind of staring at me, trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. He’s a big, athletic kid, a star pitcher for his baseball team, and a real practical joker. He was always pulling some prank or another, but he’d seen enough of the haunting himself to know I wasn’t making it up.

  “Any grub in this joint?” he asked, switching his attention to the cookie jar.

  “Help yourself,” I said.

  Steve thoughtfully munched an Oreo and gave me a quizzical look. “You really got attacked with a sledgehammer?”

  I pointed to the bruise on my forehead.

  “I thought the ghosts only came out at night,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  He sighed and wiped crumbs from his mouth. “Totally weird,” he said.

  Just then my mom came into the kitchen. “Hello, Steve,” she said. “I see you boys found the cookies.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Winter,” he said. “Welcome back.”

  “Jay, I just got off the phone with Katie’s mother,” Mom said. “Your father and I feel responsible for what happened to her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  “Nevertheless, she was in our house. We’re going over to the hospital to make sure she’s okay. Will you and your sister be okay for an hour or so?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Sally’s still sound asleep. So I don’t want a lot of horsing around in here,” she said, eyeing Steve.

  “No problemo,” I said.

  A couple of minutes later the station wagon was heading back down the driveway. Steve and I watched it go.

  “What do we do now?” he asked. “You want to play ball? Or we could go swimming.”

  “I can’t leave Sally alone,” I said.

  “But she’s asleep,” he protested.

  “You know better than that,” I said. “But I do have something in mind.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Like an expedition.”

  Steve grinned. “Right. Like to the North Pole, right?”

  “Worse,” I said. “To the basement.”

  “The basement?” he said, looking puzzled. “Why?”

  “Because there’s something down there I want to find.”

  Steve raised his eyebrows. “Like what?” he asked.

  “A body,” I said. “A dead body.”

  7

  It was Steve’s idea to call up Lucy. She’s about our age, with long dark hair and a very serious expression—except when she smiles. Lucy knows all about the haunting.

  All in all she’s pretty cool for a girl.

  “Lucy was the one who told us about how they never found the old lady’s body,” Steve reminded me.

  It was true. Lucy had a lot of good ideas about why there were ghosts on Cherry Street and I thought she secretly wanted to see them for herself.

  She showed up right away, her eyes glowing with excitement, and I told her my idea about searching for the missing body.

  “I don’t see what we can do against a ghost,” said Lucy doubtfully. “We’re only human.”

  I ignored that. “It’s the witch-thing that’s doing the really bad stuff,” I said. “And the basement is her territory. I can feel her down there. Steve thinks it might be the ghost of the old lady.”

  “Right,” said Steve. “If we find her body and give it a decent burial, maybe she’ll go away.”

  Lucy shuddered. “What about the other ghost?” she asked. “The little boy?”

  I took a deep breath. “I think he’s been trying to protect us from the bad ghost. But he’s not powerful enough.”

  “The whole idea gives me the creeps,” Lucy said.

  “We don’t have any choice,” I insisted. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “Okay,” said Lucy reluctantly. “What’s the plan?”

  “We go into the basement, find her—or her body—and drag it out.”

  “But how do you know the body’s in the basement?” asked Lucy.

  I’d been thinking about that for quite a while, and I thought I finally had the answer.

  “Because that’s the one place Bobby never goes,” I said. “That’s how.”

  8

  Steve and Lucy went back home to get ready for the expedition into the haunted basement. We agreed to meet at my house in a half hour.

  It didn’t take me long to get ready. All I needed was my flashlight, an extra battery, a stick for poking into corners, and a long, thick rope.

  Then I sat around waiting, trying not to look at the clock every thirty seconds.

  But Steve and Lucy were right on time. Both of them had changed from shorts into long pants. Lucy wore overalls with pockets everywhere, all of them bulging with stuff.

  “I brought a flashlight,” she said, “and a Swiss army knife. If we find a coffin we can pry open the lid with it. I’ve got a screwdriver, too.”

  Steve was wearing some kind of lumpy necklace.

  Lucy squinted at it. “Is that garlic?”

  Steve shrugged. “Yeah. Just in case.”

  “That’s to keep away vampires,” I said. “I don’t think it’ll work on ghosts.”

  “Phew!” Lucy laughed. “It’ll keep me away, that’s for sure.”

  “What’s that for?” asked Steve, pointing at the rope slung over the back of a kitchen chair.

  “I thought we should rope ourselves together like mountain climbers do,” I said. “So we won’t get separated.”

  “So one of us won’t get snatched away, is what you really mean,” said Lucy. “Good idea.”

  “Come on,” I said, uncoiling the rope. “Let’s get going.”

  I tied the rope around my waist then passed it to Lucy who did the same.

  Steve looked doubtful. “Well, if I fall into the witch’s bubbling cauldron of slime,” he joked, “at least I know you guys will be coming after me, one way or the other.”

  I led the way to the basement door. My heart was booming in my chest. “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “Go for it,” Steve said. But his voice cracked.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said.

  I pushed the door to the basement. As it swung open the creaking noise went right up my spine.

  “We could always do this tomorrow,” Steve said suddenly. “Yeah, tomorrow would be perfect.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Let’s get it over with.”

  I peered cautiously into the basement. It sure was dark down there—I couldn’t see anything but dim shadows and formless shapes.

  “Well,” said Steve, trying to sound tough. “What are we waiting for?”

  I propped a kitchen chair against the basement door. “So the door can’t lock behind us,” I explained.

  “Excellent,” said Steve. But he
didn’t sound convinced.

  We turned to face the darkness at the top of the stairs.

  From down in the basement I heard a PLOP, like something diving below the surface of a thick liquid. Which was ridiculous. There was no water down there, not even a puddle.

  “Did you hear that?” Steve whispered. “Sounds like dripping blood.”

  Lucy groaned. “You guys are being stupid,” she said. “Let just do it.”

  So we did.

  I flipped on the light switch.

  The only light came from a bare bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs.

  Lucy and Steve crowded behind me to look. The light was so dim we could barely make out the stairs. They were dusty and sagged in the middle.

  “What’s that smell?” asked Lucy in a hushed voice.

  A peculiar odor rose up at us. It smelled like dirty socks and moldy bread and wet garbage. It smelled like air that had been shut up with dead things for a long time.

  “Rat turds,” said Steve. “There are definitely rats down there.”

  I scowled at him. “It’s just the dirt floor,” I told Lucy. “The house is so old the basement doesn’t have a cement floor.”

  “It smells old all right,” said Lucy. “Like a mummy might come lurching up the stairs at us any second.”

  “What’s that dripping noise?” asked Steve.

  “Dripping?” I echoed, stalling. “I didn’t hear any dripping.” It wasn’t a lie, really. What I’d heard sounded more like some scaly finned creature dropping into slimy depths.

  I started down.

  PLOP!

  “I hear it!” said Lucy breathlessly.

  “Must be a leaky pipe,” I said, but I didn’t move. “No big deal.”

  “Did you ever see Alien?” Steve said. “The part where the creature is hiding up in the shadows and all they can hear is the drip-drip-drip of its slimy saliva?”

  My determination was slipping away. My stomach felt queasy.

  “That was just a movie!” scoffed Lucy. “It’s probably just a leaky pipe or something.”

  She nudged my back. “We’d better check it out,” she insisted. “A leaky pipe could make a big mess and you said there’s lots of valuable old stuff down there.”

  So I took a deep breath and started down the stairs with my friends close behind. My ankles tingled as if something under the stairs was itching to grab them. Every time I set my foot down on a tread I half expected claws to sink into my ankles.

  When I couldn’t stand it another second, I crouched down and swept my flashlight beam over the dark space under the stairs.

  Steve jumped. Shadows shrank from the light.

  “What?” cried Lucy.

  There was nothing there.

  I let out a breath. “Just being careful,” I said, my voice sounding too loud, as if something was listening down below.

  I went down a couple more steps. We were more than halfway.

  The light from the bare bulb stuck close to the stairs, like it was afraid to venture out into the basement. I strained my eyes to see beyond it but the blackness was like a solid thing.

  Anything could be watching us, cloaked in the dark, invisible.

  All I could see were humped shapes. Was something lurking among the stacks of boxes and broken furniture? Waiting for us?

  Then it happened.

  “Screeee-screee-screeeeee!”

  Something hurtled up out of the dark. A blur of motion, it flew flapping and screaming straight at us.

  Steve screamed as it hit his face. He fell, giving the rope a sharp tug.

  Lucy’s arms pinwheeled as she struggled to keep her balance and failed.

  The rope yanked me.

  I grabbed for the railing but the flapping thing blinded me. It beat at my face, trying to get at my eyes. I threw my hands up in front of me and lost my balance.

  I went down hard in the dark, the creature shrieking above me.

  9

  We were a tangle of legs and rope.

  I kicked the coils of rope off me, rubbing my back where I’d fallen.

  “I hate bats,” said Steve, hunching his shoulders around his ears and darting his eyes around, looking for it.

  “It wasn’t a bat, silly,” said Lucy. “It was just a poor terrified bird. A robin, I think.”

  My heart whacked against my ribs.

  A bird, that was all. And I’d thought it was going to pop out my eyeballs and slurp them down whole.

  The three of us got shakily to our feet.

  “Where did it go?” I asked.

  “It think it flew upstairs,” said Lucy. “How did it get in?”

  “Yeah,” said Steve. “All the basement windows are boarded up.”

  I shrugged. “One of the boards must have come loose.”

  “Yeah?” said Steve. “Maybe something pried the boards loose, you ever think of that?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “That’s why we’re down here, remember? To end the haunting, one way or another.”

  PLOP! PING!

  “What’s that?” Lucy said in a hushed voice.

  It was the sound of fat, slimy worms dropping from the ceiling into a pit of goo.

  We looked at each other. Steve was clutching the banister tightly. Lucy’s brown eyes looked like black holes.

  We started down again.

  At the bottom Lucy switched her flashlight on. Big humps rose up out of the dark and settled into the light beam as torn sofas, stacks of boxes, broken chairs.

  “Sure is dark down here,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve seen so much junk all in one place. I bet there’s a lot of great stuff here.”

  “You could hide a body down here and no one would find it for a hundred years,” said Steve, his voice cracking.

  I shivered. “Let’s start over there,” I said, pointing with my flashlight.

  “And what if we find the body?” asked Lucy, the beam wavering in her hand.

  “We bring it upstairs into the light,” I said, feeling a little sick at the thought. “Ghosts can’t stand the light. It’ll rob her of all her powers. And then my parents can give her a decent funeral.”

  Something slithered in the dark.

  “What was that?” cried Lucy, jerking her flashlight around.

  PLOP! DRIP!

  Startled, she swung her light the other way. We both aimed our beams at the sound.

  A long, skinny, black snake hung and writhed from the ceiling beam.

  “There it is!” cried Steve. “Somebody’s already put a bucket under it.”

  I blinked and the snake became just an old electrical cord left slung over the rafter.

  There was a bucket on the floor under a pipe with a slow drip. I felt my racketing heart slow down a little.

  But wait! Who had put that bucket there? Not my dad. He had been gone for days. I was sure the bucket hadn’t been there the last time I was down here.

  I was pretty sure.

  “Let’s get started,” said Lucy. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Oh, yeah?” jeered Steve. “And what if we find a rotting old skeleton? What’s that going to give you? The heebie-jeebies?”

  Lucy snugged the rope knot at her waist. “I don’t think there’s a body down here,” she said. “For one thing, it would smell.”

  “Not if it was a skeleton,” said Steve. “Besides, if you don’t think there’s a body, what are you doing here?”

  “There might be something else,” said Lucy. “A clue. We’ll know it when we see it.”

  I didn’t say anything. The basement did smell. It smelled like something had been dead and rotting down here for a long time. And the smell was getting stronger.

  “I want to start over here,” I said. “There’s a trunk I want to check out—”

  Lucy let out a bloodcurdling scream. Her flashlight dropped to the floor and rolled away.

  She backed into me, jabbering, and I fell over
a box.

  The flashlight flew out of my hands.

  It bounced on the floor and went out.

  We were in total darkness.

  10

  “I saw it!” screamed Lucy. “It’s coming for us. It has no head!”

  Steve’s laughter rang out, bouncing off the stone walls.

  He scooped up Lucy’s flashlight and aimed it over her head.

  A headless, armless creature loomed at us out of the dark. I could see how it looked to Lucy.

  “It’s a dressmaker’s dummy, dummy,” said Steve, howling with glee.

  I got up off the floor and felt around for my flashlight. “You were pretty spooked yourself the first time you saw it,” I reminded Steve.

  “That was then,” he said, grinning. “It’ll take more than a dummy to scare me now.”

  Lucy grabbed her flashlight and took a closer look at the thing, a life-size figure of a woman, made for fitting clothes. “You should have warned me,” she said in an injured tone.

  I shook my flashlight and, amazingly, it came on. I pointed it toward the dummy. “Steve and I found a trunk last time we were down here,” I said, scanning the area with my light. “But I don’t see—there it is!”

  The trunk—a big one, big enough to hold the dressmaker’s dummy, or a body—was farther back than I remembered. There were a lot of boxes in front of it.

  “Help me move this stuff out of the way,” I said. “I have a feeling about that trunk. There were some letters in it, but when I came back to look for them they were gone. Maybe they fell behind it or under it or something. Help me look.”

  “We already looked in there,” Steve said, sounding irritated.

  “Steve, you’re not scared, are you?” Lucy taunted him, flashing a grin at me.

  We all froze at a slithering noise. It was coming from behind all the piles of junk.

  “That’s the noise I heard before,” whispered Lucy.

  “Mice,” I said, not at all sure.

  “It’s too big to be mice,” said Steve uncertainly. “Maybe it’s a cat. Maybe it came in after that bird.”

  The slithering became a scratching.

  As if something with long claws was sharpening them on the stone walls.

  We backed up a little and huddled closer together. I shone my flashlight toward the sound but couldn’t see anything. My knees felt rubbery.