“Why is it my fault?” Erika asked in puzzlement.
“You told me you wanted to see this place. Then you made me let loose of Jack-T’s leash, and he got away. So if anything happens to him, you’re the one to blame.”
Abby’s barrage of words confused Erika and then overwhelmed her.
“I’ll help with the gate,” she snapped, adding sourly, “but that’s all.”
“Help me push,” said Abby, ignoring the rest of Erika’s statement.
Miraculously, though the hinges were rusted and the rangy weeds and grass blocked the gates, the two girls, straining against the ancient metal, managed to get it open. With a groan of the hinges and a tearing of clumped grasses, the gate yielded the precious extra inches needed for Abby to squeeze through. Erika was more concerned that rust had flaked off and stained her hands and shirt and jeans brown. “My mother is going to kill me,” she said, still panting from the effort. “Okay. I’m going,” she announced.
“No way!” Abby insisted. “Remember: This is your fault. And I need someone to help me find Jack-T.” Both girls looked toward the house; there was no trace of the dog. “We’ve got to find him before the sun goes down, or else who knows what will happen to him—or us—if this place is really haunted like they say? If you leave now, you’ll be responsible for what happens to my dog—and to me.”
Erika wavered. She kept looking at the house, but with a respectful, almost uneasy expression on her face.
The lengthening shadows at day’s end were really getting to her friend, Abby realized, as well as the old stories. But then, she thought, I don’t want to be here after dark, either. Aloud, she said, “Don’t just stand there. Get in here.” She crooked her finger at Erika.
With a sigh of defeat, Erika slipped past the barrier. This was easier for her to do, since she was smaller and skinnier than her friend.
“Follow me and help me call for Jack-T,” Abby ordered. She started toward the front porch where they had had their last glimpse of the terrier. The two kept calling his name, but there was no answering bark. It was as if he had vanished into the shadows. Abby couldn’t stop herself from remembering those stories about kids who had disappeared inside the old Fanning place. Were there pets that disappeared, too? She wondered. She couldn’t recall hearing anything about animals, still it seemed perfectly possible. That thought made her shiver, though the evening was warm.
The mystery of Jack-T’s loss was solved in part when they climbed the short, broad flight of steps to the porch. It was shaded by an overhang supported by six pillars carved in a way that made Abby think of a picture she had seen at school of an old Greek temple. One of the twin front doors, its hinges the victim of wood rot and nor’easter storms, leaned backward. It hung dangerously loose; Abby thought a single good shove would force it all the way down. But the tilted door left a gap beneath it that would provide easy access to a Jack Russell. It looked generous enough to allow the girls to enter as well.
Abby bent down and yelled her dog’s name into the dark beyond the opening. She thought she had heard an answering Yip! That was enough for her. “He’s inside. Let’s go,” she said, as she dropped to her hands and knees and began crawling through the gap. She was careful not to brush against the half-fallen door for fear it might come crashing onto her.
“Isn’t this trespassing?” Erika asked worriedly.
“Who’s going to complain?” Abby asked, pausing halfway inside to talk over her shoulder. “No one knows who owns this place. Let’s just find Jack-T and get out of here before it really gets dark.”
She crawled the rest of the way through. A moment later, Erika followed. Abby had the feeling she was going to have to make this all up to Erika big time if she wanted to keep her as a friend. But, right now, she had a more important concern. Where was her dog?
When they climbed to their feet and brushed the dust from their clothes, the two girls found themselves at the head of a long, dusty hallway. There was enough gray light filtering through the warped window boards and the grimy but uncovered fanlight over the front doors to let them see. Darkening open doorways lined either side of the hall.
Everything was coated with layers and layers of dust. In many places it had formed into clumps the size of small animals.
“They’re like those bunches of dust you find under a couch or bed if you’re a messy house cleaner,” Erika said. “My mom calls them dust bunnies.”
“Dust kitties,” Abby replied. “My grandma always calls them that. Weird, though. I’ve heard them called dust ghosts before. I just can’t remember who called them that.”
“They’re gross. This place is creepy. Let’s find your dog and get out of here real fast.”
It wasn’t too hard to figure out where the dog had gone. His paw prints could be clearly seen in the dust, though these were largely wiped out by a wide, wavy trail that Abby instantly guessed marked the passage of Jack-T’s leash whipping back and forth behind him as he charged. The trail led directly to a massive flight of steps at the far end of the hall. The staircase climbed sharply up to the deeper darkness above.
Unhesitatingly, Abby headed toward the bottom step.
“Are you going up there?” Erika asked, her voice little more than a whisper. Abby wondered if she was afraid that talking too loud might rouse a ghost or witch as the day grew later. But those old stories, even though they seemed more possible with each passing minute, were not enough to keep Abby from her goal of retrieving Jack-T.
“Yes, I’m going up there,” Abby answered shortly. “And if you’re going to be such a coward, then stay down here. But don’t you dare leave,” she warned as she started climbing the stairs, all the while calling for the dog.
After a brief hesitation, Erika followed. “Don’t leave me alone,” she said.
Following the marks of the dog’s dust-displacing climb, the girls ascended the steps. Erika winced every time Abby shouted for her dog. It was clear she was afraid that such calling would raise whatever might haunt the crumbling house.
Most of the doors on the second floor were closed. Abby opened one far enough to see that it was a bedroom. There was a big old bed with a drooping canopy over it, mostly now just rags and tatters that stirred in the draft from the doorway where the girls stood. Across the twilit space, Abby saw herself reflected in the oval mirror above a dusty dressing table; a crack ran diagonally down the mirror, so she saw herself reflected in two pieces.
“Boo!” she said to her broken self. She began to giggle.
“Come on!” snapped Erika.
Jack-T’s progress down the upper passage had cleared a path through the dust, which seemed much heavier here than downstairs. The curling gray stuff would reach Abby’s ankles if she stood where it was densest. In many places, it was extra-deep; the girl suspected air currents had created eddies that mounded the dust into rounded shapes in these spots.
“They look like little graves,” Abby commented. “It kind of reminds me of a dusty graveyard.”
“Please don’t talk like that,” said Erika, sounding on the verge of tears.
But there was no stopping Abby, who was following a train of thought now. “When I was really little—in second grade—some other kids and I made an animal graveyard. We buried everything in a patch of ground near a real cemetery: Cassie’s rabbit, three of Todd’s goldfish. We had a special ceremony for Maggie’s hamster and someone else’s cat—I don’t remember whose. We’d even go through garbage cans to find dead mice and slugs and snails. Sometimes they’d really smell.”
“That is so gross. Please stop!”
“Anyhow, it all got plowed under by the gardener’s tractor when he was clearing the weeds outside the fence. I hadn’t remembered that until now.”
“And I’m sorry you remembered it at all,” said Erika unpleasantly.
They followed Jack-T’s trail to a spot in front of a narrow open doorway near the far end of the hall. In the faint gray light inside, they saw a flight of hi
gh, steep stairs angling sharply upward.
“It must lead to an attic or something on the third floor. Maybe to that tower, too,” said Abby.
The disturbed dust clearly showed that Jack-T had managed to scramble up these steps, too. Abby was puzzled. At home, the dog wasn’t crazy about stairs, especially ones that would have challenged him as these clearly would. But there was no doubt that this was where he’d gone. She called hopefully to him, but she heard nothing back.
“Stay close,” she said to Erika, gripping the girl’s wrist and tugging her forward before the other could protest.
Pausing from time to time to call “Jack-T! Here, boy!” Abby started up the stairs. Erika, her wrist still circled by Abby’s fingers, followed.
The stairs were steep—each was twice as high as a normal step. To Abby, ascending them was almost as hard as scaling the steps in the fun house at Playland. The girls had to use the railing to pull themselves higher on the twisty staircase. The steps, like everything else, were coated in dust. They could see evidence of Jack-T’s struggle to climb up. But there was nothing to indicate he had come down again. Abby was sure her dog was still in the attic.
The two paused when they reached the near dark at the top of the stairs. The space was easily as big as the house. Light came from two dirty windows, one at each end of the space that had slanted walls and looked like the inside of a giant tent. They were standing in the middle of a dense sea of dust, several inches deep, where boxes and trunks and pieces of furniture stuck up like islands in a gray sea. Abby kept hold of Erika’s hand, partly to encourage her, partly to keep her from bolting.
But when she opened her mouth to call for her dog, Abby began to cough. “It’s so dusty,” she said, when the fit had passed.
Erika sneezed and nodded and sneezed again.
The silence of the space was discouraging and unnerving. Why wasn’t the dog bounding over to her and barking his head off? Abby wondered.
The dog’s prints and leash marks continued to the left. But here the leash had left only a line, not the wide wavy path it had downstairs. It was as though her pet had slowed down so the leash had no longer trailed him like the wake of a motorboat. Had something made him more cautious here?
She let go of Erika’s wrist, but, a moment later, Erika slipped her hand into Abby’s as they moved to follow the path the dog had cut through the cushion of dust. Abby was vaguely bothered by the fact that the two of them were holding hands like scared little children lost in the woods in a fairy tale. Still, she had to admit, it made her feel just a bit better. Erika really was a good friend, she reminded herself.
“Here, boy. Here, good dog,” Abby kept repeating. But the silence was unbroken.
They were almost to the window at the attic’s end when the dog’s trail ended in a big circle of violently disturbed dust. The girls could see bare, sagging floorboards showing through dust curls. There was no sign of the terrier and yet no sign that he had gone any farther than the circle. The dust outside the circle was not disturbed at all. They looked back the way they had come: There was only the path they had made following Jack-T this far.
“It’s like he got here and disappeared,” Abby said in a whisper.
“Why are you whispering?” Erika wondered.
“Now I feel like something might be listening,” the other said softly.
“What something?” Erika asked, dropping her voice to a whisper also. She held more tightly to Abby’s hand. Her friend, meanwhile, was looking thoughtfully around the vast, shadowy space.
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Abby admitted. “I just have this funny feeling that something is going to happen.”
Then both girls saw them at the same time.
There were things stirring under the dust—moving toward them. Too scared to say anything, the two clutched hands and watched as a dozen shapes, each the size of a rabbit, crept through the dust. It was impossible to guess what was underneath the filthy gray mat that was thicker than the thickest carpeting Abby had ever seen.
“Dust bunnies,” said Erika. She began to giggle in a high-pitched way that made Abby feel even more scared than she already was.
“Kitties,” Abby said, and began to giggle herself, though nothing seemed a bit funny at the moment. Then a sudden chilling thought came to her. “I bet they got Jack-T.” Her throat felt so dry, her voice so weak, she wasn’t sure Erika had heard her.
But the other girl had. “Now they’re after us!” she cried. “Shoo! Leave us alone!”
Whatever things were under the dust didn’t shoo. They came closer. Watching them, Abby said, “I don’t think there’s anything under the dust. I think the dust is alive!” She had an awful vision of someone climbing the steps to the attic, seeing their footprints leading to a bigger circle in the dust, and no trace of the girls to be found anywhere.
Though Abby felt frozen in place with terror, her brain was racing a mile a minute. There was so much dust. Too much dust. She wondered if the drifting-down everyday stuff that relentlessly covered flat surfaces and hid under couches and beds had been added to by other things. She imagined children or pets smothered by dust, crumbling away to become a part of the ever-growing gray carpet swarming with some bizarre kind of life. Maybe those stories of witches and magic in the early days of Fanning place weren’t so far-fetched. Maybe what they were seeing was the result of some long-ago spell, or just some leftover magic lingering in the household dust, even after the ones who had conjured it had turned to dust themselves.
Erika was stamping her feet in front of the dust mounds, which had paused in their approach to the girls. Could her friend’s movements actually scare such animated dreck? Abby wondered. She suddenly recalled a sick joke she had heard about a carpet layer who finished carpeting an old lady’s living room. Turning to look over his handiwork, he discovered a single small bulge near the middle of the freshly laid carpet. Unwilling to undo his work to smooth things out, he quickly grabbed a hammer and pounded what he thought was an air bubble flat. To his surprise, it seemed more solid than he’d expected, but he finally flattened it to his satisfaction. The new carpeting looked wonderful. At that moment the old lady came into the room and asked him, “Have you seen my parakeet? He got out of his cage a little while ago.” The workman shook his head, all the time looking at the newly flat spot in the middle of the rug.
“Step on them!” she told Erika. “Stomp them!” Abby brought her foot down on the mound nearest her, flattening it. A moment later, Erika flattened one on her own. But now they could see more and more of the rounded shapes swarming toward them.
Abby abandoned her plan of fighting back. “Run!” she shouted. Still holding Erika’s hand, she half dragged her friend along after her. The sudden movement surprised the dust things. They froze in their circle as the two girls hurried between them, heading for the top of the stairs. Then there were hissing sounds as the dust things realized their prey might be escaping.
Looking back, the girls saw uncountable dusty shapes run together as they chased them. Now there was one big dust bulge hurrying toward the two of them. But Abby and Erika were almost to the head of the stairs.
Suddenly Erika cried, “Oh! It caught me. It hurts!”
Turning, Abby saw her friend frantically brushing at the gray mass that was creeping up her leg. Abby slapped at the thing, then dug her fingernails in and yanked it away from Erika’s skin. It peeled off like a filthy bandage; where it had wrapped Erika’s leg, the flesh was covered with red dots, like a thousand pinpricks.
Ignoring Erika’s hurt, she hauled her the last few steps to the top of the stairs. Then they were pounding down the steps, trying not to stumble. Halfway down, Abby glanced up and saw what looked like a big gray wave—a dusty tsunami—gathering itself as it hovered over the staircase. Then it began to pour down the steps like a dry waterfall, adding the dust on the stairway to itself.
They reached the bottom, and Abby slammed the a
ttic door.
A moment later, they heard what sounded like surge after surge of loudly hissing softness hit the other side of the door.
“Can it get out?” Erika asked fearfully.
“I’m not going to wait to see!” said Abby.
The two ran for their lives. Before they reached the top of the main staircase, they heard the attic door burst open. A boiling sound, like water dropped onto a super-hot griddle, seemed to fill the whole house.
On the ground floor, they rushed down the hallway, aware of the gray horror seething behind them. When they reached the broken front door, Abby, in a gallant gesture that surprised even her, told Erika, “You go first.”
Erika needed no encouragement. She scrambled through the gap like a frightened mouse. A moment later, Abby was scuttling through. When they were both clear of the doorway, they looked back. Through the opening they could see a swirling mass of dust. But, for whatever reason—maybe the magic worked only in the house—the dust creature did not follow them out into the evening.
All the same, the girls hurried on until they had squeezed back through the gate. It was only then, as they stood catching their breath and trying to rid their mouths and noses and lungs of the lingering scratch and smell of dust, that the full impact of Jack-T’s loss hit Abby. She began to shake all over and sob; Erika quietly hugged her and patted her on the back.
When the worst spasms of grief had passed, Abby impatiently wiped the tears from her cheeks. “We can’t say anything about this to our folks, especially my mom and dad. They’d want to come right over and see for themselves. And that—dust monster—might get them. We probably shouldn’t tell the other kids, either. That would only make them start to dare each other to check it out. I think it’s better if we just don’t tell anyone.”
“But Jack-T is gone,” said Erika, who had pretty well worked out the dog’s fate for herself, it seemed.
“I’m going to tell them that he ran off chasing a rabbit and I don’t know what happened to him. You can say the same thing, if anybody asks you. And tell them it happened way back there, closer to town.” Abby thought a moment and then added, “My parents keep telling me to stay away from the Fanning place. Of course, they’re thinking how a kid could have an accident. They never think of ghosts—”
Haunted Houses Page 9