The Final Nightmare

by Rodman Philbrick

  Gritting my teeth against the pain, I started to imagine all the horrible things the creature would do to me when she got me back down into the basement.

  “The trunk is mine!” she hissed. “And so are you!”

  Panic rushed through my veins.

  With the last of my strength I braced my feet on the stairs, gripped the handle as hard as I could, and tugged with all my might.

  The other handle broke!

  The witch-thing tumbled down the stairs with an awful screech and sprawled on the dirt floor.

  “I’ll get you!” the creature moaned. “I’ll get you yet!”

  Then she scuttled back into the shadows like a wounded thing.

  Losing no time, I hauled the trunk up into the kitchen.

  Safe at last! Totally out of breath, I collapsed against the basement door—after bolting it shut.

  A door opened down the hall.

  “Jason? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Mom.” I jumped guiltily. Where could I hide the trunk?

  “What was all that noise? Is everything okay?”

  “Noise?” I moved into the hallway so she wouldn’t have to come into the kitchen to talk to me.

  Mom had a blue pencil behind her ear and a calculator in her hand. “Clattering, banging. Was that you?”

  Dad’s voice came from inside the room. “Carol, I need you to look over these calculations. We may have a problem here.”

  “I was just playing, Mom,” I assured her, disappointed she hadn’t heard the witch’s screeching.

  She gave me one of those considering looks, the kind that meant she was suspicious about my answer.

  My heart sank. In a minute she’d come into the kitchen and see the trunk and demand all kinds of explanations. Then my dad called her again and she reached a decision.

  She turned back into the office.

  “We’re going to be working a while longer,” said Mom. “Maybe you could look in on Sally.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  I went back to the kitchen. I couldn’t leave the trunk here. I’d have to carry it up to my room. Mom almost never went in there. She might not even see it.

  I called up Steve and got him to come over. He was eager to help now that it was out of the basement. We hauled it up to my room and set it in the center of the floor.

  “What do you think is in there?” asked Steve, his eyes bright.

  “The truth,” I said. “The solution to the haunting.”

  22

  I knelt in front of the trunk.

  I was excited but scared, too. Who knew what was really inside, or why the ghosts were fighting over it?

  “You’d better stand by the door, Steve,” I said. “You can run for help if we need it.”

  The leather of the trunk was cracked and dry. My fingers trembled as I reached for the clasp.

  Well, I thought, here goes. With still-shaking fingers I undid the clasp.

  As I swung it open, the lid made a tremendous skreeky noise, like bones being pulled apart.

  “What’s in it?” cried Steve breathlessly.

  I stared in disappointment. The witch-thing must have gotten everything already. “Nothing,” I sighed. “Just a few scraps of paper.”

  I lifted out torn pieces of newspaper. They were crumpled, like they might have been used to wrap something. But what?

  “What’s that ribbon?” asked Steve, pointing over my shoulder.

  “Ribbon?” There, caught in a corner of the trunk was a red ribbon. I pried at it, starting to feel excited.

  A ribbon just like it had been tied around the letters I’d seen when Steve and I first found this trunk, weeks ago, but those old letters had disappeared before I ever got a chance to read them.

  Slowly the ribbon came free—and with it some flattened papers! I slid the ribbon off. Here was the answer, I just knew it!

  There were only two letters in the little bundle. I unfolded the first one and read:

  Dear Alice,

  I am beside myself with worry over the ruby. I can’t imagine where it could be. Did you look in the case in my room? I thought I packed it but it’s possible I never did.

  We are retracing our steps in a desperate hope of finding the jewel. It’s the only inheritance I have from my mother and without it all our hopes for the next few years are dashed.

  If you find it please telegraph me at once.

  Take good care of little Bobby and give him a big kiss from his mom and dad.

  Affectionately,

  Sarah Wood

  A missing jewel? The witch-thing had been screaming something about a jewel that night in the attic. But what would a ruby have to do with Bobby?

  I spread out the second letter, hoping it would have some answers.

  Dear Alice,

  We’ve nearly given up hope of ever recovering the jewel. I’m afraid we’re going to be too poor to keep you on as a nanny for the next few years. But don’t worry. We’ll give you an excellent reference.

  Our last hope is that the ruby is still somewhere in the house. We’re making plans to be home by next week and I’ll turn the place upside down looking for it. I can’t believe it’s really gone!

  Tell Bobby how much we love him and miss him.

  Affectionately,

  Sarah Wood

  I looked at the date on the top of the letter. It was written just a week before Bobby died. But I didn’t see how any of this solved the mystery.

  Then it started to make sense, sort of. The jewel the witch-thing was looking for must be this same ruby Bobby’s mother had lost!

  I turned to tell Steve. He was smoothing out a sheet of crumpled newspaper.

  “There’s stuff in here about Bobby,” he said, sounding excited. “All about how he died and everything.”

  I scooted over and grabbed the paper, feeling my heart quicken once again. But there wasn’t anything I didn’t already know from the papers Katie and I had found in the attic.

  The newspaper described the tragic death of little Bobby Wood. He’d fallen from the cherry tree in his backyard while his parents were in Europe. Only the nanny, Alice Everett, had been home at the time of the accident.

  “But Jason,” said Steve, frowning, “how could Bobby fall from the cherry tree? When you hear him at night, doesn’t he fall from the top of the stairs?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The newspapers got it wrong, that’s one thing I’m sure of.”

  “Hey, here’s more,” said Steve excitedly. “Something about a missing teddy bear and a big ruby.”

  “What?” I snatched it from him.

  “Hey! I found it first,” Steve complained.

  “Yeah, but it’s my ghost,” I reminded him.

  The beginning of the article told of Bobby’s death again. Then it said: “In an odd coincidence, the child’s favorite plaything, an old teddy bear, is nowhere to be found and the same is true of the Wood family’s most prized possession, a magnificent ruby. The jewel was left to Mrs. Wood by her mother and provided the collateral for her husband’s business loan. If the ruby is not recovered it is expected Mr. Wood will lose his business. And if the teddy bear is not found, a little boy will go to his grave alone.”

  “That’s creepy,” said Steve. “What’s ‘collateral’ mean?”

  Proud to know a word Steve didn’t, I dug into what I could remember of my parents’ conversations. “It means something valuable. You take the jewel to a bank and ask the bank to lend you some money. Then if you can’t pay them back the money they keep the collateral—the jewel, in this case. But since the ruby was missing, the bank must have taken Mr. Wood’s business instead.”

  Steve looked disappointed. “Oh. Well, I don’t see what all that has to do with ghosts,” he said, tossing the bits of paper back into the trunk.

  “No,” I said slowly. “I don’t, either.”

  But I knew there was a connection. Bobby’s ghost wanted me to figure it out, that’s why he’d urged me to look in the trunk.
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  And that worried me. Bobby was just a little kid. He expected older people to understand what he meant. When they didn’t he was likely to have a tantrum.

  And Bobby’s ghostly tantrums were the most terrifying things I’d ever seen.

  23

  That night I asked for a glass of warm milk before I went to bed, just as a precaution.

  “I hope you’re not staying up too late, reading those scary books of yours,” Mom said as she handed me the milk.

  “Not a chance,” I said. “Tonight I’m going straight to sleep.”

  “Good,” Mom said with a smile. “That’s exactly what you need. You’ve been exhausted lately, overdoing it. And you know what happens when you overdo it.”

  “Right,” I said. “My imagination gets out of control.”

  She was wrong about my imagination getting out of control, but I’d given up trying to convince her the house was haunted. The ghosts didn’t show themselves to adults, so adults thought they didn’t exist.

  A pretty neat trick, if you happened to be a ghost.

  The warm milk trick seemed to work. As soon as my head hit the pillow I started to doze off. Dreaming about baseball, and swimming, and how I couldn’t wait to get back to our own house …

  I woke up with a jolt, every nerve tingling. I gripped the sides of the bed, my eyes wide.

  There was some kind of vibration in the air.

  BONNNG!

  The grandfather clock! It must have already chimed at least once and woke me up. I lay rigid, waiting for it to strike again.

  The broken grandfather clock in the hall only chimed when a haunting was about to happen.

  Dread sat on my chest, making it hard to breathe. I hated the waiting. I hated lying helpless, straining my ears for the first sound of a little kid’s scared footsteps. I knew what was coming—and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  The haunting had started.

  Outside my bedroom door Bobby’s ghost was crying. Then I heard his small feet hitting the floor as he ran.

  He was running in fear. Crying so hard he was hiccuping.

  Running and running, the thud of heavier footsteps chasing him, getting louder and louder as the sound of his crying went higher and higher.

  Then I heard the witch’s voice screaming at him.

  “Come back here, you little brat! Give me that jewel!”

  The little boy kept running. His feet went right by my door. Followed a heartbeat later by the thudding of the witch-thing, screaming, “It’s mine! Mine!”

  I tensed up, waiting. Because I knew what was going to happen. It was always the same, whenever the haunting started.

  The little boy kept running. The witch-thing kept chasing him.

  And then—

  CRUNCH!

  The little boy smashed through the railing at the end of the hallway and fell to the floor below.

  “Heellllllllllllpppp meeeeeeeeee!”

  His awful, falling scream cut through me like a knife.

  If I lived here fifty years—which I wouldn’t—I would never get used to that terrible sound.

  The house fell silent. Sometimes that was the end of the haunting and after a while I could turn over and go back to sleep.

  But sometimes it was just the beginning of something even more terrifying.

  I lay with my hands at my sides staring straight up into the darkness, Bobby’s dying cry banging around inside my head.

  No way had Bobby died in a fall from the cherry tree, like it said in the paper. He died the way I heard him die night after night. Hurtling over the stairway while someone chased him!

  It had to be the nanny, Alice Everett. Bobby’s nanny was the witch-thing, the old lady who’d stayed on in the empty house until she died. The old witch whose body had never been found.

  She was the one who had moved Bobby’s body from the house to under the cherry tree, so no one would know it was her fault that he’d died.

  Boys fall out of trees, right? Accidents happen. Everybody believed her at the time.

  But why had she been chasing the little boy? Was it Bobby who had stolen the jewel from his mother? Was the old witch-thing still trying to get it back, even when she was a ghost haunting the same house as Bobby?

  Suddenly a sound outside the room blotted out my thoughts.

  Something was scratching at my door.

  I held my breath and concentrated on seeing in the dark. Fear was all around me—a cold tingling all over my body.

  The knob was turning! The door began to open.

  Maybe it’s my mom, checking up on me, I thought hopefully.

  A foul smell invaded the room.

  Not Mom.

  I dove out of bed and rolled underneath.

  24

  I peeked out and couldn’t see a thing. But I could hear it. Something had come into my room. I could hear it wheezing.

  Under the bed probably wasn’t the best place to hide. Too obvious. But too late now—I couldn’t move without giving myself away.

  Heavy breathing. The rustle of old clothing. The invisible thing was coming closer.

  Peering into the darkness, I tried to follow the sounds. Who was it and what did they want with me?

  Then I got another whiff of that foul stench. Only the witch-thing smelled like that.

  The ghost of a child killer was in the room with me!

  I peeked out from under the bed and saw the bottom part of her black cloak trailing along the floor. That was the rustling noise.

  The cloak moved back and forth across the room.

  Suddenly I knew what it wanted. The trunk. The dead creature had come to take back the trunk!

  The old trunk was stored in my closet. But the papers and letters I’d found inside it were someplace even safer.

  Under my pillow.

  What a goon! What had I been thinking—that was the most obvious place. And if the foul creature found the letters, she’d find me hiding under the bed!

  I had to do something, and fast.

  The door to my closet creaked open.

  The witch cackled with satisfaction as she fumbled with the trunk latch. The lid creaked open.

  This was it! The only chance I’d have.

  I slid out from under the bed and snaked my hand up over the side, feeling for my pillow. My hand found the letters. I snatched them and quickly ducked back under the bed.

  “Nooooo!”

  The witch hissed with fury. Had she seen me?

  Her black cloak crackled. Her breath rattled, filling the room with its putrid stink. Her sticklike arm shot out angrily, sweeping across the top of my bureau. Books and airplane models clattered to the floor.

  “I’ll get you, you little brat,” she croaked.

  I scrambled farther under the bed until my back was against the wall and clutched the papers to my chest.

  Footsteps approached the bed.

  I tried to shrink myself smaller.

  Suddenly the bed was lifted off the floor as the creature let out another angry bellow. She flung the mattress against the wall and it slid back down. I was still hidden.

  The dead thing grunted as she bent to look under the bed. I held my breath, trying not to shake so hard.

  I knew she had me.

  I flattened myself against the wall.

  Screeee … screeeee …

  Her claws scraped the floor an inch from my face.

  25

  Scrunching my eyes shut, I waited for her claw to shoot out and snag me. I tried to think of a way to get out of this but my brain was in slow motion.

  I’ll kick and scream, I thought. Maybe Mom and Dad would hear me.

  Her garbagey breath was suffocating. My skin crawled as I waited for her to grab me.

  But nothing happened.

  Then I heard soft, evil laughter, moving away. As if the witch had thought of something worse than grabbing me.

  My bedroom door closed softly.

  She was gone.

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nbsp; I counted to a hundred to be sure and then crawled out from under the bed, a queasy feeling stirring in my stomach.

  I should have been relieved. I had won, hadn’t I? At least for now.

  But the old witch-thing was up to something. Her laughter echoed in my brain, sending fear rippling up and down my spine.

  I put the letters in an old paper bag and stuck them under the trunk in the closet. She’d already looked in the trunk. She’d never look there again.

  As I started to close the closet door, the empty mirror frame started to glow with a blue light. The mirror reappeared on the door and the mist began to swirl.

  Blood rushed to my head.

  I bolted for the door. The knob turned uselessly in my hand, round and round. I couldn’t get the door open!

  “Bobby!” I shouted angrily, “Open this door! The witch is going after Sally. You have to let me out right this second.”

  The image of the little boy swam in the mist. He looked sad.

  I tried the door again but it still wouldn’t open. Anger swelled in my chest like a giant bubble.

  I grabbed the first thing that came to hand—my Boy Scout hatchet—and heaved it at the mirror as hard as I could.

  But the satisfying sound of shattering glass didn’t come. Instead the hatchet blade sank into the mirror and vanished with a faint pop!

  From the mirror the ghostly image of Bobby just looked at me with a sad expression. He was glowing, filled with the blue light.

  As I watched in horrified amazement he raised a finger and began to write another message on the other side of the mirror. This time the message was different.

  I scowled, reading, “THE SECRET IS IN THE ATTIC.”

  My anger started charging up again. “Whatever happened to ‘Find the witch’? That was the message last night, right? So I got the trunk, I found the witch,” I shouted. “What about that?”

  But the image began to fade, taking the light with it.

  What was going on here?

  26

  I was alone in the dark bedroom.

  All around me the house was deathly quiet.

  Had the witch already grabbed Sally while Bobby kept me in here trying to get me to do stuff by making up spooky messages?

  Sally was so trusting. She would never suspect anyone wanted to harm her. It would be easy to get her to go along with anything.