Ghost House Revenge

by Clare McNally

  Alicen heard laughter in the kitchen and pushed through its door. Obeying a silent command, she sank to the floor and waited. She didn’t feel the cold of the linoleum.

  There was a woman standing above her. Alicen couldn’t see the features of her face. But she saw the blond hair and smiled, unafraid. Her mother had had blond hair.

  “You’ve come to me,” she whispered.

  A hand touched her forehead, and Alicen tilted her head back. She held up her arms to the apparition, her fingers spread wide like a little child’s.

  “Please hold me tight, mommy,” she said.

  It was the seven-year-old Alicen asking for affection, the Alicen of all her dreams, where her mother came to love her. But her mother did not embrace her this time. Instead, she pulled her to her feet. Alicen looked at the watery features, wishing she could see them more clearly. She’d waited so long.

  “Gina VanBuren made you sad today,” the vision said.

  “Yes, she made me think of you, mommy.”

  “That was bad of her,” was the reply. “She must be made to pay for it, right?”

  “Yes, mommy.”

  “Then do as I say,” the vision ordered. “Tomorrow there is a bus trip.”

  “Yes.”

  “Gina must sit directly behind the driver of the bus. Then she will die.”

  “Die,” Alicen breathed.

  “And when we are rid of her,” the vision said, “I will give you this.”

  Smoke billowed around the apparition’s hand as she raised it to Alicen’s face. In the white cloud sat the huge, brilliant diamond that had once been on Sarah Kaufman’s hand. Alicen reached for it, mesmerized. She saw it not as Sarah’s ring, but as the ring her mother had always worn.

  “She must sit up front,” the vision said, snatching her hand away.

  “She will,” Alicen promised. “Oh, mommy, I’ll be so happy to wear your beautiful ring!”

  The next morning, Alicen woke up in her bed. She went down to the kitchen for breakfast, completely unaware that she had been sitting on its floor just a few hours earlier.

  “Look at that bus, Alicen!” Gina cried as they stood together in the school yard. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Yeah, it sure is,” Alicen said, yawning. She was exhausted but didn’t know why.

  It was an enormous touring bus, one with a completely flat front covered with shining glass. The two girls climbed up inside of it and looked down the narrow aisle at the rows of high, upholstered seats.

  “Hey, there’s Doreen and Beverly,” Gina cried, pointing.

  Her friends had taken over the seat under the back window. Gina waved and started to go to them, but Alicen grabbed her arm.

  “Can’t we sit up front?” she asked.

  “Why?” Gina responded. “Everyone else is in the back.”

  “I’d rather sit up here,” Alicen said, indicating the seat behind the driver’s.

  “What difference does it make?”

  Alicen shrugged. “I don’t know. Uh—I sort of get sick sitting in the back.”

  Gina still felt guilty about mentioning Alicen’s mother. Maybe she could make up for that by humoring her friend. She nodded.

  “Okay,” she said, “but I think you’re weird. A seat’s a seat!”

  Alicen slid into the seat Gina followed, then leaned out in the aisle to talk to Doreen and Beverly, moving back every few seconds to let other children walk past.

  Alicen leaned forward and pressed her hands against the glass partition behind the driver’s seat. Suddenly she felt sleepy. She yawned, and all at once her yawn became a groan. Gina looked at her.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Percy’s the bus monitor,” Alicen said. “And Jamie Hutchinson’s coming in right behind him.”

  “We could have sat in the back,” Gina said. “The bus is full now.”

  “I guess it’s okay.” Alicen groaned. She turned to look out the window, hoping neither Percy nor Jamie would see her. She was still mad at the boy for telling her stories of murders and making her look like a fool in front of her father and Melanie. But Jamie was too busy reading. Mr. Percy, after a few orders to the children about behavior and staying in groups, sat down and opened up a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

  The driver came in next, her face hidden behind a curtain of stringy blond hair. Percy scoffed at her, then turned his eyes back down to the paper, wondering why the bus company would hire such an unkempt woman. The driver climbed behind the wheel of the bus without a word to anyone and started the engine.

  Just then, Alicen felt a tap on her shoulder. “Hi, Alicen!”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Alicen said plainly, recognizing Jamie’s voice.

  “Oh, come on,” Jamie said. “Are you still mad at me? Don’t you want to look at my book? It tells you all about the planetarium.”

  “No.”

  “It’s real neat,” Jamie said. “Don’t you want to see the pictures?”

  “No!”

  Jamie shook his head at her and sank back down into his seat. Now Gina turned and pinched Alicen’s arm.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked. “He’s trying to be nice to you, and you’re acting stuck-up. Why are you mad at him?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Alicen said, not wanting to mention the incident that had so embarrassed her. “He’s stupid, and I don’t like him any more.”

  Alicen gazed out at the passing highway. She saw a station wagon with several black dogs in the back, a van driven by a young man with long hair, and a hitchhiking pair of girls. The van stopped to pick them up. This was such a perfect day for a field trip, Alicen thought. The sky was bright blue, and the sun was shining warmly. Why, then, did she feel so uneasy?

  She felt a pain in her eyes from the glare of the sun and closed them. Her head dropped against the window, bobbing in rhythm with the vibrations of the engine. She could still hear the children around her talking. Someone started singing, and others joined in. It sounded as if they were singing through a long tunnel. She was far, far at the other end.

  “A hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer, if . . .”

  Someone was talking inside Alicen’s head. She recognized the voice, but couldn’t place it. The words made her shudder.

  Gina must die, must die, must die.

  “Ninety-five bottles of beer, if one of . . .”

  Alicen snapped upright and looked through the glass partition at the back of the driver’s head. She felt lightheaded, as if she were floating in air and not on board the bus at all. The song the children were singing seemed further and further away. Now the pact she had made in the night came back to her. She knew who the bus driver was. Alicen longed to reach through the glass to touch her mother, but she simply leaned forward and stared. She saw the back of the woman’s neck turning from pink to alabaster. Marks of veins began to travel under the skin, like droplets of rain racing on a windowpane. Beyond the woman’s shoulder, Alicen could see the soft pink hand twisting as its skin tightened. No one else saw this but her.

  She knew the terror had begun.

  “Eight-six bottles of beer on the wall, eighty-six . . .”

  Suddenly, with a loud growling noise, the bus shot forward.

  “Hey!” a boy cried.

  “What are you doing?” Percy demanded, leaning forward. “Slow down at once!”

  The woman ignored him. The bus picked up speed at such a rate that the trees along the road mashed together in one long, green blur. White lines slipped under its wheels with immeasurable speed.

  “Everyone!” Percy shouted, anticipating an accident, “on the floor!”

  The children immediately ducked under their seats, too frightened to ask questions. Gina wanted to obey, too; she tried to move but somehow was frozen to her seat. She squeezed her eyes shut, covering them as she screamed.

  But no one could hear her cries over the revving of the motor. It spun faster . . .

&n
bsp; “Heeelllp!”

  . . . and faster . . .

  “MOM!”

  . . . and faster.

  “STOP THIS AT ONCE!” Percy shouted, his old man’s voice straining. He grabbed the steel bar in front of his seat, his newspaper flying to the steps below. The old teacher pulled himself to his feet now and stumbled across the rubber-matted floor. His hand shot forward in an effort to grab the driver.

  It went right through her.

  “What the—?”

  Percy backed away in horror, hitting the front window. The driver looked up at him, grinning. Her face was a death mask, grotesquely like blue-veined marble. Percy opened his mouth, but no sound came from it.

  Screams jerked him from his dazed state. He looked down the bus at the fifty youngsters crouched on the floor, helpless. He saw a girl with braided brown hair still sitting in the first seat. Her hands were over her face, and she was screaming. Alicen Miller sat next to her, staring at him with hateful eyes.

  Percy had the irrelevant thought that she was a disobedient brat. Why wasn’t she on the floor?

  Alicen smiled slightly and pointed to something beyond Percy’s shoulder. He turned and looked out the huge front window of the bus, seeing a sign that read DETOUR and behind it a construction site.

  “Oh, dear God,” he whispered.

  Now a surge of bravery made him lunge again at the driver. But as he touched the steering wheel, ice-cold hands grabbed hard at his wrists. His fingers pulled away in a curling, jerking motion. He whimpered softly as he felt the sickening crunch of his bones under the viselike grip of the phantom driver.

  He screamed. The driver roared at him, knocking him back to his seat with breath so foul that Percy felt a wave of nausea. But that pain was cut off by another sharper pain that ripped through his neck like a hot knife. His hand went to his throat, feeling something sharp there. He stumbled toward Gina’s seat, blood dripping from his opened mouth.

  Screams of the children. The angry motor, honking horns, sirens. These were the last sounds Percy ever heard.

  The bus collided at last with the tall wooden fence that surrounded the construction site. It shot over the rim of a pit, rising twelve feet into the air before it dove down into the deep excavation. Small bodies thumped from ceiling to floor as the bus rolled. But somehow, Gina’s body didn’t move at all. She had not yet opened her eyes, even to see what had knocked her to the floor a second earlier. She could feel Alicen’s legs underneath her. Something warm and heavy pinned them on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

  The bus rolled, bumped, and skidded. It landed nose-first, its entire front crushing, the steering wheel becoming one with the partition. Shards of glass flew like missiles, striking the now-empty upholstered seats.

  Though it happened in less than a minute, an eternity passed before the bus finally skidded to a halt and toppled over on its side. Gina at last opened her eyes.

  Percy’s unseeing eyes stared down at her, inches from her own face. Blood was spurting from a wound that surrounded a shimmering piece of glass in his throat.

  “GET HIM OFF OF ME!” she screamed, struggling frantically.

  “Gina, you’re crushing me!” Alicen cried, the spell broken. She wriggled out from under her friend, grateful that only her legs had been caught. Then she leaned against the top of the bus, now its side, and stared down at Percy’s corpse.

  “GET HIM OFF! GET HIM OFF!”

  Jamie Hutchinson was the first to collect his senses. He pulled himself to his feet, clutching the soft cushion of his seat. Rubbing his temple, where a painful bump was growing larger, he walked ahead to see why Gina was screaming so. In the shock that is the aftermath of a terrible accident, it didn’t register in his mind that his teacher was dead. He only thought that Gina was being crushed as he wrapped his fingers around Percy’s upper arms. Glass crunched beneath his feet as he pulled hard at the body, to no avail. It was wedged in too tightly, and at thirteen, Jamie wasn’t very strong.

  “Jamie, please,” Gina cried. “I can’t breathe.”

  “I’m trying,” Jamie answered, desperate. He turned around. “Hey, somebody help me up here!”

  No one responded. They were too caught up in their own terror. Jamie saw one boy holding his arm at an odd angle. A piece of raw bone jutted from a rising bruise at his elbow. A girl with blond braids sat on the floor with the back of her hand to her nose, trying to stop the flow of blood. Another girl was crying about her fingers, and a boy was lying on the floor, his eyes closed, blood trickling from his forehead. Jamie turned his head quickly away.

  “Gina, push hard when I tell you,” he ordered. He tugged at Percy’s arms. “Now!”

  Gina pushed with all her strength, and still the body did not move. A pounding noise over her head made her look up. There she saw two policemen sawing away at one of the window frames. One shouted through the small opening.

  “Stay still, everyone! We’ll have you all out in a minute!”

  The first cop sawed with all his might, trying to make an exit. The door itself was useless, lost somewhere in the twisted front of the bus. He could barely make out the steering wheel. He knew the bus driver could not have survived. Yet for some reason, there was no sign of a body.

  “Where the hell is the driver?”

  “Beats me, Tim,” the other cop answered.

  Gina had started crying again, fighting the pressure of Mr. Percy’s corpse. Tim looked down at her as he sawed the metal window frame. Assuming the body on top of her was the driver’s, he continued to work. At last the frame gave way, and he jumped down into the bus. Walking carefully along the row of broken windows pressed flat against the ground, he went to Gina and wrenched the body from her. Without a word, he hoisted it up to the opening, where his partner dragged it out. Moments later, it was covered with tarpaulin.

  “Easy now,” Tim said, sliding his arm under Gina’s back. Behind him, two paramedics climbed down into the bus to attend to the injured children.

  As he helped Gina to her feet, Tim noticed the seat and realized something like a miracle had just occurred. Three ugly triangles of glass poked out from the vinyl seat, in exactly the place where Gina might have been sitting if the man’s body hadn’t knocked her to the floor. He looked at her as he held his hand out to help Alicen.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” Gina said softly, not sure of herself. She turned to Alicen, who stood staring at the twisted frame of the partition. There was no expression on her face.

  “How about you, honey?” Tim asked, squeezing her hand.

  Alicen shook her head mutely. Now Tim led the two of them to the opening in the ceiling, where they waited their turn to be lifted out of the bus. Once outside, the teen-agers blinked at the flashing red lights and bright sunshine. Gina put her arms around Alicen and stood watching as the others were helped out. She was shocked to see one of her classmates, Tommy Jones, on a stretcher with his eyes closed. Someone had bandaged his head.

  Hank Emmons, manager of the construction crew, climbed down into the pit to survey the damage. When he reached the bottom, he ran his fingers through his silver hair and looked around in awe. The last of the group were being helped out of the bus. Several of them were put on stretchers and carried to the ambulance waiting at the top of the pit. As far as he could see, these were the only serious injuries.

  “This is the kinda thing that makes you believe there’s a God,” he said to a policeman.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, no one was killed,” Hank said. “And from the looks of that thing”—he indicated the bus—“no kid should have lived. Yeah, God was looking out for these kids.”

  “Not for the driver, though,” the cop said. “He was killed.”

  Hank frowned. “I can’t say I’m sorry. I saw that bus coming down the road. Serves the jerk right, speeding down a busy highway with all those kids.”

  Within the next half hour, all the students had been brought to the top. A
s they waited for another bus to take them home, they shared a soda and snacks with the construction crew. The food somehow helped them forget the accident.

  Gina had had enough time to realize she was all right and to calm down a little. Some of her classmates had also relaxed and were talking together in excited groups. But for the most part they stood silent, numbed by the experience and wanting nothing but to see their mothers. Alicen was one of the silent ones.

  Gina offered her a soda, but Alicen shook her head. “Why aren’t you afraid?”

  “Because I’m all right,” Gina said. “Besides, a lot of worse things have happened to me.”

  Alicen nodded, knowing Gina was right but unable to share her strength. She felt a terrible fear. Why, since they were all right? But that was just it. Something deep inside Alicen made her feel they weren’t supposed to be all right, that something was supposed to have happened and didn’t.

  “I just want to go home,” Gina said.

  “Me, too,” several of her friends who stood nearby agreed in unison.

  “But we’ll probably have to go back to school and answer a lot of questions,” Jamie said. Seeing a cop approaching, he said, “Starting right now.”

  “All right,” Tim said. “I’d like to ask you some questions about your driver.”

  All the children started to speak at once.

  “One of you, I said,” Tim interrupted. He pointed to Jamie, who by his height seemed to dominate the group.

  “Tell me, son,” he said. “Did you get a good look at the driver? Did he seem to be tired, or drunk, or—”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Jamie said, pushing a lock of red hair from his eyes. “I was reading, so I just kinda glanced up at her.”

  “Her?” Tim echoed. “The driver was a woman?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Have you seen her since the accident?”

  All the teen-agers shook their heads.

  “Percy made us all duck under our seats,” Jamie said. “After that, we didn’t see a thing.”

  “I heard a scream,” Beverly said. “But I sure wasn’t going to look.”

  There was a silence, and then Gina asked, “What did happen to the driver?”