“Don’t kill too many while I’m gone,” I said.
“Don’t get caught. And be sure to do what those silly owls tell you,” Rose responded.
Cats and owls were not usually friends. Rose didn’t like the owls because they were creatures that could actually harm her, not that any of the ones at Haunted Bluff ever would.
I met my cousins in the foyer and we made our way to the owls. I was relieved to have a distraction. I didn’t want to sit around all day waiting to talk to Grant. I wanted to keep busy.
It didn’t take us long to reach the owls and take flight, heading in the general direction of the forest. The day was overcast and looked as if it might pour down rain at any moment. I just hoped the weather would hold out until we got home.
Plus, if my mother realized we were gone we’d have bigger problems on our hands than an unsolved murder.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The events of the previous night had set me thinking, and my conclusion was that the explanation for all this trouble and mayhem was the Root of All Evil. They were involved in all of it, I was sure.
Given that we now knew where the Root was based, I decided that it might be prudent to have a little chat with our former vampire butler, Mirrorz, the Root’s leader. Once a trusted member of our family, Mirrorz had worked for many years with the Garbos and supernaturals in the haunted house. As we found out the hard way, the fact that the rest of us had considered him a family member didn’t mean that he saw himself that way. Nope, not in the least.
The evil group had been quiet recently, and I was starting to think they were too quiet. If their goal was to take over the mansion and all of its treasures, why weren’t they actively trying? The only thing I could figure was that they were, and we just didn’t know it. The hole in the side of the house seemed more like proof every day. Someone had broken in. The fact that we didn’t yet know what they had taken only made the break-in more sinister.
While I was busy thinking about the Root, I cast my eyes downward. We were well above the treetops, and I very much hoped to spot Elton’s house from above without any trouble. Unfortunately, that was not to be. The owls were very good at flying in patterns, but we crisscrossed the tract of forest several times and still came up empty. Finally I signaled to the owls that we should head for the spot on the road where we had parked with Cookie.
From that starting point, we tried to fly over the woods in roughly the same direction I thought we’d been walking when Cookie was with us. Only this time we were in the air instead of slogging through the tangled underbrush on foot.
If I had thought that flying was going to be easier than walking, however, I had been sorely mistaken.
“We’re hopelessly lost,” said Pep after an hour of fruitless searching. My hands were starting to ache and my nose was cold.
“We know where we are,” Lark said, trying to keep our spirits up. “At least we’ll be able to get home. I’m just not so sure we’ll be able to find Elton’s house again.” She kept scanning the forest as she spoke, but there was nothing in sight except thick trees in every direction. The few clearings we had spotted and checked out were not Elton’s house.
In fact, there was no sign of Elton’s house anywhere. The owls were getting frustrated; they didn’t like being out and about during the day at the best of times, and this fruitless search was wearing on them as much as it was on us.
“What about over there?” Pep asked, pointing in the direction we had just come from. And sure enough, from this angle there turned out to be a break in the trees that hadn’t been visible from the other side.
“Yes, I think that might be it!” I said.
Still not very good at flying, I slowly turned in the air as the owls directed us toward the spot where Pep had pointed. I hated this part of flying. It was like riding a bike. You could get on and go straight without too much difficulty, but the second you actually had to navigate, the problems began. I gave thanks for the smooth ebony broom in my hands and gripped it more tightly than was strictly necessary.
Pep had been right. We soon spied Elton’s house through the trees, looking just as it had the last time we had seen it. We landed right in front of the house, and the owls immediately moved off to relax while they waited for us to finish our mission.
If I had been expecting Paul to be sitting there on the steps again, pretending to be a skeleton, I was bound to be disappointed. Paul was nowhere to be seen.
“Should we try the shed?” Pep asked, heading in that direction without waiting for a reply.
Lark and I fell in behind her, and the three of us made our way around to the side of house. The old wing where we had found Paul the last time we’d been here was locked once again. I tried the door several times, each with a little more force, but it wouldn’t budge.
Lark kicked the door just as Pep yelled for her not to. Lark hopped backward with a yelp and grabbed her injured toes.
Pep shook her head at her sister. “Should we try an enchantment?” she asked, frowning at the door.
“We could,” said Lark. “There are probably enchantments on it already, though, so trying to open it without knowing what they are could be dangerous. Do you want to see what you can see through the window?”
The windows were mostly covered over. We managed to see a bit of the inside through slips in the old drapes, but not enough to help us figure out if Paul was inside.
We returned to the door, and Lark glared at it.
I decided to try one more thing, warning my cousins ahead of time. “You two stand back. I’m going to try and open it using the simplest enchantment I can think of.”
Neither of them argued. A simple enchantment hadn’t worked before, but since Cookie had been careful to hide the more complicated one she had used, the simple version was my only option.
“Unlock the lock,” I said. A stream of enchantment left me and circled through the keyhole.
To my complete and utter disbelief, I heard the lock on the other side of the door creak and shift.
“It worked. How could it possibly have worked?” Pep marveled, clapping her hands gleefully.
In truth, I had no idea, but I did have one good theory. “It worked because Paul was rushing when he left here, and he didn’t have time to enchant anything properly on his way out. Since he was a skeleton, I’m surprised he could manage even as much as he did.”
“The enchantment was already on the lock,” Lark pointed out. “I’m sure he had permission from Elton to activate it. Otherwise he would have had a difficult time functioning here when Elton wasn’t around.”
She was right, and I thought carefully about what it implied before I pushed the door open and found the dusty old space much the same as it had been before. It took us only a matter of seconds to confirm that Paul wasn’t there.
“He probably isn’t in the house, either. Don’t you think he would have come out and spoken to us by now? There’s no reason for him to hide,” said Pep.
Lark and I nodded in agreement, and we all made our way back outside. I glanced at the large fence, glad that at least I now had a good idea what it was for. Werewolves could safely stay in a fenced in area and not hurt anyone. All these years, that’s probably where Elton had been when he howled, until he was killed.
Despite the fact that none of us thought we were actually going to find Paul, we headed for the front door to make one last check.
“Be careful,” Lark warned. “This one could have more serious enchantments on it.” Once again we were all of one mind.
I knocked on the front door and got, as expected, no answer. Trying the same simple enchantment I had used around back, I found that the countermeasures weren’t strong enough to keep me out, as they had been when we’d come with Cookie. I wondered why, but I didn’t stop to think about it too hard. The owls, sheltering under a nearby tree, were fluffing their feathers and not looking pleased. We had to finish up and be on our way as soon as we could.
In
almost as little time as it had taken to confirm that Paul wasn’t in the older wing, we now knew that he wasn’t in the newer part, either.
We emerged back outside utterly perplexed. “He said he was going to stay here,” I mused.
“He didn’t actually say anything about forever, though,” said Lark. “He wanted to confirm that no one else was going to come looking for the house. Maybe he did that for what he thought was long enough, and then he ran.”
“I don’t think he ran. If he hadn’t been in a hurry he would have used better enchantments on his way out,” I pointed out. There had been better enchantments around the house that he could have activated. The fact that he hadn’t triggered them again made me think he had bolted in one big hurry. Maybe he had barely had any time to get away at all.
But from what?
“Do we go back now?” Pep asked, glancing at the sky and starting to walk toward the owls. The overcast day had become more threatening, not less, while we fooled around in the woods.
“That look on Jane’s face says there’s somewhere else she wants to go first,” said Lark.
“I think that we should go to the town green,” I said.
We were standing under the shelter of the trees, with the owls now visibly impatient. With the clouds gathering in thickness and darkness, it was only a matter of time before the rain started pouring down.
“When you say town green, what do you mean?” Pep asked.
At least she hadn’t said no right away.
“I mean I think we should go speak to the Root of All Evil. It’s time. It’s likely that they’re responsible for this murder, and even if they aren’t, Paul has now disappeared. You expect me to believe they don’t know where he is? He left in a hurry. The biggest evil around here is the Root. I think it’s time we paid them a visit,” I said.
“Given how much competition they have, that’s saying something,” said Pep dryly.
I knew what she meant. The denizens of Down Below were no slouches in the “responsible for evil” department, and there had been a recent spate of murders that I had arrived home just in time to solve. That didn’t stop me from wanting to confront the Root before they got even bolder.
“Very well. We can go. I just don’t want to linger,” said Pep resignedly. “We can’t risk being away from Shimmerfield for long. There could be another break-in.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The owls weren’t thrilled about making another stop, but they grudgingly agreed to take us in to Shimmerfield. There was a good chance that something had happened to Paul, and I was sure the Root would know something about it. Besides, it was about time I had a little chat with the old Garbo butler.
We couldn’t land directly on the green and risk being seen, so we landed in the woods nearby and made our way to the clearing on foot, leaving our brooms leaning against a tree. The owls once again took what shelter they could, making it perfectly clear by their body language that they were about at their limit of patience.
Just as we emerged from the cover of the trees, the clouds that had been threatening all day opened up. The rain had begun at last.
As tiny droplets pelted my cheeks, I gazed at the house where I was sure the Root was holed up. With the dark gray sky as background, it looked as formidable as ever. Even from a distance, the creepiness factor was huge. I felt a crawling sensation down my back and shivered.
“Does the house look bigger to you?” Pep whispered.
“Bigger than what?” Lark asked.
“The last time we saw it,” said Pep.
Now that she mentioned it, the ramshackle old place did look more formidable than it had before. The sheer menace emanating from it was somehow worse now. I didn’t know if it was an illusion or a real enchantment. Either way, evil’s home had grown.
We stepped forward slowly, once again trying to sneak up on the house. Our attempt hadn’t gone terribly well the first time, but I was hoping for better luck today. The purple curtains were drawn, but I felt eyes on us as we walked quietly toward the nearest building. It helped that the weather seemed to have driven the townsfolk indoors, so there was no one around to wonder what we were up to.
I glanced back once, but they had hidden themselves so well that there was no evidence that a group of owls was waiting for us to return.
“It’s going to rain,” said Pep.
“It already is raining.” I glanced up at the sky as the ever larger droplets hit my face harder than before. If ever there was a day for mischief and trouble in town, this was it.
“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” said Lark, who was usually all for my risky ventures. Her being hesitant about going to the Root’s lair worried me.
“We have to ask them about what’s happened! There has been a murder, and now Paul has gone missing. I want the Root to know that we know they’re there,” I whispered.
“Does that make the most sense? If they don’t know we know about them, that leaves us free to sneak up on them if we need to,” said Pep. “Who knows what we could do if we kept the advantage of secrecy! Once we tell them we’ve found their hiding place, they could move, and we might never find them again.”
I shook my head. I didn’t think they were going anywhere. They had clearly chosen this house in the center of town for a reason, and now they were settled in. “I don’t think so. I think they aren’t afraid of us. That’s exactly what they’re trying to say. Bring it on. Well, okay I will.”
Pep sighed and nodded. “You might be right. Fine. I guess it can’t be worse than it already is.”
The green grass of the summer had long since faded to brown; everything was dying in preparation for the cold winter. Nights were already so cold that most of the foliage had fallen and all around us the land was barren. The only reason we had any trees to stand under at all was because of the evergreens.
“How do you want to do this?” Lark asked after a long silence.
I bit my lip. I had been staring at the house and I’d come to a conclusion. It was situated all by itself. From a distance we could hide and watch the font door, but we could never get close without being spotted.
“I plan on walking right up to the front door. What do you to think?” I said.
Two mouths dropped open.
“She’s kidding, right?” whispered Pep.
“Sure. Let’s do that. What could possibly go wrong?” Lark said.
“We can’t sneak up on the house,” I pointed out. “Besides, we have to stay in the open if we want to confront Mirrorz where people can see us. We can’t go inside, because that would give him a chance to do something we’d regret. Instead, we stay on the village green and in plain view,” I said.
My cousins nodded, and I swallowed hard. I really hoped this was the right thing to do. If it wasn’t, I could be bringing people I cared about into danger, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all. What I wanted was simply to have a chat with Mirrorz.
I stepped forward and started walking toward the Old Bucket House. When we were about halfway across the green, I saw one of the upstairs curtains flutter. The movement was tiny, but it was enough. Somebody was inside, and they had seen us. It was showtime.
At about fifteen feet from the porch I got very nervous. Nothing else had happened; there had been no sign of any vampires. Lark kept fidgeting, while Pep stared straight ahead, the whites of her eyes extra visible in the gray gloom.
“I was sort of expecting a welcoming committee,” said Pep.
“Why haven’t they come outside by now?” Lark whispered.
“Maybe they’re staying inside and hoping we’ll just go away,” I said.
I took one more step forward. Would I actually dare to knock on the door?
I took in the house. The porch was falling in. There were holes and rotted wood everywhere. The door itself did not appear to be in much better shape than the siding. One of the panes of glass next to the door was broken. Through that opening I could see nothing but darkness beyond
. The house was so empty and deserted that there wasn’t the tiniest sliver of light on the other side of the door.
“Don’t take another step. It’s too dangerous. You can’t get killed the afternoon after you have a great third date,” whispered Pep hoarsely.
“That’s ridiculous, but she’s right,” said Lark, also keeping her voice low. “I don’t think we should go any further. If they aren’t going to come out and talk to us, we should just leave.”
“And we should at least tell Cookie where we are before we come back,” said Pep.
I stared at my cousin, then made a decision.
“I know you’re in there,” I yelled toward the door of the house. “Come out! We’ve only come to talk. It’s about time, wouldn’t you say?”
Pep flinched, then exchanged a glance with her sister.
I shrugged and tried to shake off the nerves that were building, but nothing happened. My yelling had gotten no response.
The rain came down yet harder. The front door still didn’t open. No curtains moved. There was utter silence.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a few Garbo witches. We aren’t that scary!” I tried again.
There was still no movement from the house.
“Maybe you should threaten them,” said Pep.
“That’s probably the worst idea I have ever heard,” said Lark. “If the Root really is in there, we are terribly outnumbered. I don’t think issuing threats is going to do us any good. In fact, it could get us into even more trouble. They’ll probably just say we provoked them and deserved whatever we got.”
“If something happens to us, Cookie will definitely avenge us,” said Pep. Her voice did not sound as sure as her words, and her words weren’t all that comforting to begin with.
I took one more step forward. “Mirrorz. I know you’re in there. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. We need to talk.”
Spooky Skeleton Page 15