by Jon Scieszka
Harvey calls this place a root cellar. He told us to climb in through the coal chute because some “intruders” boarded over the regular doors after Harvey’s family left.
Huh, I wonder why. Who wouldn’t want constant access to a swampy mud pit that smells like someone died down here?
Oh, no! Oh, no! What if Harvey died here? What if he wants to kill us here on the same spot, to avenge his own murder?
This thought kicks up the volume of my brain’s constant Run! Run! Get out of here! so loud that my ears stop working for a moment. But how can I run when Thad’s just standing there smiling up at Harvey? It’s not like it’s a competition, but . . . what if it turns out that Thad is actually braver than me?
Harvey is about halfway through with floating down through the basement ceiling. He told us he couldn’t climb down the coal chute because he can’t leave the house. It’s so freaky to see him hovering up by the ceiling. Right now I can see his legs dangling from the bottom of a rafter. Now it looks like that rafter decapitated him. Now it looks like he’s hanging. . . .
Think about something else! I tell myself. Ordinary stuff. There’s plumbing pipe down here. You know about plumbing pipe, because that’s what you built your potato cannon out of. And everyone thought you were so cool. And you are. And, see, this is really just like any basement, except for the muddy floor. And that safe over there. Who keeps a safe in their basement?
It’s a giant black old-fashioned-looking box, almost as tall as Thad. The safe has four number dials on the front that could be the great-grandfather versions of the one on my locker at school.
Studying the safe calms me down, too.
Harvey has floated all the way down to the floor by now, and I’m able to keep my voice steady to ask, “So, is the treasure in the safe?”
“I admire your powers of deduction,” Harvey says, and he sounds so polite I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or not.
It would be great to have that skill in middle school.
“Harvey told me all about this upstairs,” Thad says. “See, he knows the combination, but his hands always go right through the dials—”
“And would go right through the treasure if I tried to pick it up,” Harvey adds. He demonstrates by swiping his hand through the safe.
That part of being a ghost would kind of stink.
“So you tell us the combination, and we’ll turn the dials for you,” Thad says, sounding a little too eager.
“You do it,” I say. “It will be good practice for next year at middle school when you have a locker.”
Harvey gives me a look, and I almost think he can tell how much trouble I had with my own locker, that first week of school. I really was planning to train Thad on combination locks. Once I, you know, had enough practice myself.
Harvey tells Thad the numbers, and Thad sets each dial carefully. The lock clicks and the door creaks open.
Like a crypt, I think. A tomb. Maybe Harvey just tricked us into letting out all the flesh-eating zombies?
For a moment, I’m wishing I’d never seen anything but G-rated movies, and never played any video games after Reader Rabbit. I can picture about ten billion different kinds of monsters that might come swarming out of that so-called safe in the next few seconds.
But nothing happens except that the door stops when it’s separated from the rest of the safe by only a crack. Thad grabs it and yanks it the rest of the way open.
And there, on the floor of that giant safe, lies . . .
A single sheet of paper.
“That’s it?” I say in disappointment. “That’s the huge, giganto treasure that you’ve been haunting this house for?”
“Yes,” Harvey says. You wouldn’t think it was possible, him being a ghost and all, but he’s grinning like crazy. The whole time since I met him, I’ve mostly been trying not to look at him. But now I do. And—he kind of looks like he would have been a fun kid to hang out with, when he was alive. It looks like he had freckles and red hair and a cool gap between his front teeth that he could probably whistle through.
When he was alive.
Thad reaches into the safe and pulls out the paper, and all three of us huddle together to look at it. I see lots of made-up-sounding words like “whereas” and “heretofore.”
“What is it?” Thad asks.
“It’s my brother’s will,” Harvey says. “Written long after I died. He wanted to leave this house to the side of the family who would take care of it. Not the miscreants who let it fall into such shameful disrepair.”
“Yeah, well, no offense, but why isn’t your brother the one haunting people, trying to get them to find his will?” I ask. “Why’d he send you to do his dirty work?”
I’m not sure I really want to know all the ins and outs of ghosts and hauntings. But I am kind of curious.
“Because my brother died in his sleep as a ninety-year-old man at Willow Knoll Nursing Home,” Harvey says. “I died here, in this house. Protecting this house.”
I take a step back.
I knew it, I think dizzily. Next he’s going to point out his half-buried skeleton in the corner of the dirt floor. . . .
I bang my elbow against one of the plumbing pipes, and it knocks the seal loose. The pipe falls to the floor.
Harvey gives me a cold look. Hey, it’s not my fault his brother hid his will too well and let the house go to, uh, miscreants.
“Don’t worry,” Harvey said. “I didn’t die down here. I fell from the roof when I was eleven and three-quarters years old. I was repairing the roof after a huge storm. I was the man of the house after my father died—I was doing a man’s job—I was almost done. . . .”
He puffs out his chest a little, like he’s really proud of himself. But then he seems to remember that it killed him, and he slumps again.
“We must right this wrong,” he says, sweeping his arm in a ghostly way that trails vapor toward the sagging pipes, the rotting rafters, and maybe even all the way to the CONDEMNED signs out on the house’s doors.
I don’t want to become a ghost anytime soon, but it would be sweet to be able to do that.
“What do you want us to do for you now?” Thad asks, all eager beaver all over again.
See, that’s just the kind of thing that’s going to get Thad killed in middle school.
I flash Thad a “down, boy” look, and puff out my chest just a little. I say to Harvey, “Whoa, there. Hold on. Me and Thad said we’d help you find your treasure. We didn’t make any promises about righting any wrongs.”
I’m trying to think how to explain, without sounding like a chicken, that righting wrongs sounds dangerous. Like, we might have to deal with the people doing the wrongs.
Harvey gives me a look that, I swear, is just like the one Hatchetface Hutchinson gives my class when someone says something really dumb.
“The only thing you have to do,” Harvey says stiffly, “is place my brother’s will in an envelope and mail it to the county courthouse. That will take only a penny or two. And I believe the postal service makes its rounds twice a day, so you can select the time that is most convenient for you.”
I’m about to tell Harvey, “Oh, come on. Stamps never cost just a penny. Did they?” or maybe, “Since when does the mail come twice a day?” Or maybe I could really shock him by saying, “Let’s just use email. It’s free.”
But just then we hear a bunch of loud noises overhead: enough thumps and thuds for an entire convention of ghosts and ghouls and maybe even flesh-eating zombies.
“Um,” Thad says nervously. “Why didn’t you tell us that you have other, uh, friends, haunting this house with you?”
And it’s written all over his face that he’s thinking, If those are more ghosts, please let them be friendly. Whatever they are, please let them be friendly. Please, please, please . . .
“Those aren’t ghosts,” Harvey says, and it really bothers me that he looks nearly as terrified as Thad. “I fear—” He stops, as if whatever he’s afraid of is too awful t
o put into words. He grits his teeth—probably the same way he did climbing onto the roof before he died—and he says, “I will go up and see for myself. You two stay here.”
Like he thinks we’re going to follow him?
Harvey shoots up through the rafters. A second later he’s back, moaning.
“It’s them!” he cries. “My worst fears are realized!”
And now he’s really freaking me out, shooting around the room in a panic. I am so proud of myself that I can stay all calm and cool and collected and manage to croak out, “Uh, who? Who is it?”
Harvey settles back down to the floor beside Thad and me, but he still flickers nervously back and forth.
“A group—no, a gang—of troublemaker boys,” he says. “Older than us. Since the last tenants moved out, these boys have come here a lot. They swear and curse and everything.”
He sounds as horrified as my grandmother. I’m thinking that Harvey had better never hang out in the eighth-grade wing of my middle school. The shock would kill him, if he wasn’t already dead.
But all this calms me down.
“Enh, what’s the worst thing they could do?” I ask, shrugging.
“They write on the walls,” Thad says. “They—”
He breaks off, because it sounds like the entire gang of troublemaker boys has trooped into the room right over our heads. They are stomping and shouting, and I can hear someone calling out, “That’s right—let’s burn it down now. The whole house is going to be torn down next week—we’ll just help things along!”
And the next sound we hear—is that a match being struck?
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a ghost to turn pale, but Harvey does. He looks like he could faint.
Me, I just freeze.
Two boys found burned to death in basement of abandoned house, I think. What if me trying to make Thad brave just gets both of us killed? What if we get stuck haunting this old house—or what’s left of it after it burns down—for the rest of eternity?
But Thad—he’s actually grinning.
“Harvey,” he says. “You’re a ghost! Scare them away!”
Oh, yeah. Why didn’t I think of that?
But Harvey’s already shaking his head.
“Believe me, I’ve tried,” he says. “They can’t see or hear me. Only certain people can. Otherwise, don’t you think I would have gotten help finding the will before now?”
I take a deep breath.
“Harvey, could you go back upstairs and see if they’ve started the fire yet?” I ask, in my best trying-to-stay-calm-when-I’m-really-terrified voice. “So we know how much time we have to—”
The word exploding in my mind is “escape.” But Thad jumps in and says, “Right. We need time to plan how to stop them.”
Is he nuts?
Without saying a word, Harvey zooms back up through the rafters to check out the action above us. While he’s away, Thad says excitedly, “I bet it’s only the pure-hearted who can see ghosts. That’s why we can and those bad kids can’t.”
I’m trying to figure out how to say, “And why would being able to see ghosts be a good thing? Why do you act like it’s a reward?” But Harvey is already back, looking slightly less worried.
“No flame has yet been set to the walls of my beloved edifice,” he says, which I guess means they haven’t set the house on fire yet. “They’re arguing about whether they should have a new troublemaker do it, a dark-haired fellow I haven’t seen before—they say he has to go through some sort of initiation first. There are five of them, and they’re all talking at once, and no one’s listening, so that should give us—”
“Enough time,” Thad says, and even though I’ve known him all my life, it’s like he’s suddenly turned into somebody else. His eyes are shining behind his glasses, and he chops at the air with his hands, like a general giving out orders. “They’re older and probably bigger, and there are more of them, so we’re going to have to use the element of surprise.” He reaches back and grabs the plumbing pipe I knocked away from the wall a few minutes ago. He holds it out to me. “You can make a potato cannon with this really fast, can’t you? That would scare them away.”
There are a million things wrong with Thad’s plan, starting with the fact that—duh—we don’t have any potatoes. And it took me a whole summer to put together the potato cannon I have at home and get it to work right. And, to make a potato cannon you either have to set hair spray on fire or use an air compressor—two other things we don’t have. And, really, the smartest thing to do right now would be to go somewhere safe and find a phone and call 911.
But since Aunt Myrna and Uncle Frank and my mom and dad don’t think we’re old enough to have cell phones yet, it could take too long for us to find a phone. Harvey’s whole house could be on fire by then. And, anyway, how long would it take the fire department to come save an empty house? And . . . I don’t want to admit how much this matters, but if I tell Thad we should just sneak away and call 911, he’ll probably stop looking at me like I’m the bravest, smartest, greatest person on the face of the earth.
And, believe me, since I started middle school, he is the only person who still looks at me that way.
I grab the plumbing pipe from his hands.
“We can work something out,” I say.
***
Only about five minutes have passed, but everything has changed. Thad and Harvey and I are no longer in the basement, just a coal chute away from safety. Now we’re back on the first floor of the house, crouching in the shadows. It’s getting darker and darker. We’re pressed against a wall behind the room where the crowd of juvenile delinquents is clustered around a candle. I keep hearing random phrases like, “hold your hand in the fire” and “carve your own tattoo, like we did” and “swear allegiance to the gang.” But my hearing goes in and out too much for me to make sense of any of it.
Thad and I are both clutching lengths of plumbing pipe. We have our jeans pockets and sweatshirt pockets stuffed with the best ammunition we could find in a pinch.
Harvey stands in the passageway between our room and the gang’s. The gang’s voices suddenly get louder, and someone screams, “Didn’t you think we’d find out?”
I’m not sure what they’re arguing about because I’m too busy watching Harvey. He waves his arms and screams, “Now! Now! Do it now! Before they kill someone!”
Thad and I both spring up and whip the lengths of plumbing pipe around the corner. Thad puts a chunk of petrified bread in one end of his pipe and I put a toy soldier in the end of my pipe. And then, in the split second that I pause to aim, two things hit me.
One: Did Harvey say, “kill someone”?
Two: Is that Anthony Gorgonzola, the scariest-looking kid in eighth grade, in the center of the gang? Pinned down—like the rest of the gang is even meaner than him?
I want to stop everything. I want to run away. I want to throw up.
But Thad has already shot his petrified bread at the gang, and I can’t leave him without backup. I close my eyes and blow as hard as I can into the end of the plumber’s pipe.
Ping!
The toy soldier I aimed hits a wall right over the gang’s heads. Without pausing to think, I’m reloading, shooting again. And so’s Thad.
Ping! Ping! Ping!
Neither of us can aim very well, but he manages to clip one gang member’s ear, and I hit one in the back. And we have surprised them. In the split-second flashes of looking up before I reload and fire again, I see the gang jumping up, screaming, “Bullets! We’re under attack!” and “We’re surrounded!”
Maybe these guys were brave enough to give themselves tattoos. But they’re terrified of a few lengths of plumbing pipe, some bread crumbs, and a handful of toy soldiers.
In the flickering light from the candle, I see the gang take off running out of the house. I hear the front door slam behind them again and again: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Only, they’re in such a hurry to get away that
someone drops the candle.
“The carpet!” Harvey cries, floating over the hungrily licking flame. “It’s on fire!”
Thad and I rush forward, stamping out the flame. Thad snatches up a flashlight that one of the gang members dropped, and he’s swinging the beam around the room as if that’s a way to look for more flames.
Someone grabs my ankle.
“I think you just saved my life,” a deep voice says.
Thad swings the beam of the flashlight toward the voice, and my heart practically stops.
It’s Anthony Gorgonzola, the scariest eighth grader ever, still lying on the carpet.
Why didn’t you count how many times the door slammed? my brain screams at me. Why didn’t you worry more about your own life than Harvey’s carpet? Why . . . My brain hiccups a little, overwhelmed.
“Wait a minute,” I say to Anthony Gorgonzola. My voice shakes only a little. “What did you just say?”
Before he has a chance to answer, the front door creaks open yet again. The whole room is bathed in one of those bright spotlights that police use at crime scenes. And, running out of the light, is yet another of my nightmares: my English teacher. Hatchetface Hutchinson.
But she totally ignores Thad and me—and Harvey—and rushes over to hug Anthony Gorgonzola.
“My son!” she cries. “I knew this was too dangerous!”
“Stop it, Mom,” Anthony says, pushing her away. “I had to risk a little danger to get the evidence to convict those losers.” He pulls out a wire from under his shirt—clearly some sort of recording device. “And I did. It’s all right here. They listed every single one of their crimes during the initiation ceremony.”
My brain is still stuck on an earlier part of the conversation.
“You two,” I say, pointing from Anthony to Hatchetface Hutchinson and back again. “You’re related?” I gulp. “Why doesn’t everybody know that at school?”
“That would have made it really hard for me to work undercover,” Anthony chuckles, and he doesn’t sound like the toughest kid in eighth grade anymore.
“My son works for the sheriff’s office,” Hatchetface Hutchinson says. “My coworkers and I tipped him off to a crime wave at our school. A gang of older boys has been recruiting middle schoolers to commit certain crimes for them, because the younger kids get lighter sentences if they’re caught. . . . It’s just lucky that my Anthony has such a baby face that he could still pass for a fourteen-year-old, to get the evidence he needed.”