Who Ghost There?

by Who Ghost There (epub)

  They left us a pan of Dad’s delicious Lynn-sagna. After dinner, we were all standing around the kitchen, fighting over the last bits of crunchy noodles in the dish, when Leni cleared her throat.

  “Guys, I don’t want to leap to concussions, but did one of you take my sunglasses?” She probably meant “conclusions,” but with Leni you can never tell. Instinctively, we all looked at her head—that’s usually where her sunglasses are when she can’t find them—but they weren’t there. Everyone shrugged. Leni sighed. “Oh well, it’s probably my fault. I’m always losing things.”

  Luan turned toward Leni, looking uncharacteristically serious. “Actually, Leni, it’s not just you. I can’t find Mr. Coconuts,” she said, her voice cracking. “I lock him in his trunk every night, but this morning he wasn’t there … and the trunk was still locked!”

  I almost choked on a lasagna noodle. Mr. Coconuts can be pretty annoying, but none of us would ever mess with him—not just because Luan loves him, but also because he has those creepy dummy eyes that seem to follow you around the room.

  “Dudes, while we’re on the subject of stuff going missing … what happened to all the hot water?” piped up Luna. “My shower turned icy this morning, even though I was the first in line for the bathroom.”

  “This house is ancient. Maybe there’s something wrong with the water heater,” Lori said, trying to sound nonchalant, though she seemed a little freaked out. Lana, our resident plumber, looked offended.

  “Hey, I keep ol’ Betty in tip-top shape,” she said. “There should always be enough hot water for at least five showers.” As she and Luna started squabbling, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye streaking past the doorway to the darkened dining room. Lola grabbed my sleeve, looking terrified.

  “Linky, did you see that, too?” she asked. I nodded, and we darted over to the doorway. I looked into the shadowy dining room and gasped. The grandfather clock was levitating inches off the ground. Before I could say anything, Lola screeched to the others, “Guys! Guys! Come look!”

  My sisters ran over to join us just as SLAM!—the grandfather clock fell to the floor and started shaking and chiming. Everyone screamed—even Lucy, which I didn’t think was even remotely possible.

  “Get back, it’s not safe!” I yelled, pushing everyone into the kitchen. “Lynn, give me a hand with this table!” Lynn and I flipped the kitchen table on its side, then pushed it against the doorway as a barricade. “That should hold them off for a minute,” I panted.

  “Lincoln, what the heck is going on?” Lori demanded. I looked at my sisters, trying to think of how to explain the mess I’d gotten us into. Lily toddled over and grabbed my hand, pointing to the refrigerator and her alphabet magnets.

  “We can play later, Lilster, but right now I need to—”

  “No, Lincoln, look!” Lynn said, slugging me in the arm and also pointing to the fridge. I gasped in horror as I realized the colorful alphabet letters were moving … by themselves. The red letter G sidled up to the purple E.

  “Dudes, it’s spelling something!” Luna shouted. I watched, frozen, as the letters slid across the fridge to form the words G-E-T O-U-T. Everyone gasped.

  “It’s not safe in here, either,” I cried. “Everyone to the garage! I’ll explain there.”

  Lola narrowed her eyes at me. “No, explain now,” she insisted. Suddenly, all the magnets fell off the fridge and clattered to the floor. Lola screamed and ran for the back door, diving through the dog flap in a very un-Lola-like fashion. The rest of us scrambled through the regular door and raced to the garage. Lori was the last one out of the house. She stumbled into the garage, breathing very hard, and immediately locked the door behind her.

  “Okay, Lincoln, now you’re going to explain,” she said. I looked around at my sisters—I’d never seen them so scared. Even Lisa, woman of science, was nervous. I took a deep breath.

  “I don’t know how to explain this, but last night, when you guys were at Flip’s, Clyde and I found ghosts in the house,” I told them. Lisa rolled her eyes, back to her skeptical self.

  “All right, where do I even begin to explain how ludicrous this is,” she started, but Luna cut in.

  “Come on, Lisa, you can’t pretend you haven’t been noticing freaky stuff, too. I heard you asking about who knocked over your beakers,” she said. Lisa glared at her.

  “Look, at first we didn’t know what kind of spirits they were. It seemed like they just wanted to throw a little party in the attic,” I said. “They were actually pretty cool to hang out with, so … I kind of told them they could stay.” My sisters looked at me as if I were crazy. I went on anyway, trying to explain what had happened, but leaving out the part about tricking them into going to Flip’s. Lynn made a fist.

  “So we’re just going to let a bunch of dumb ghosts kick us out of our own house?” she said, punching a nearby bag of mulch in frustration.

  “No way!” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of it. Clyde and I are ARGGH! cadets. We’re trained to deal with spirits.” I tried my best to look brave and reassuring. “You guys should be safe in here. I don’t think the ghosts are interested in our dingy garage.”

  “Just our bedrooms and tiaras and stuffed animals,” said Lola. “Mr. Sprinkles is in there!” she wailed as I exited the garage.

  In the driveway, I took out my walkie-talkie and paged Clyde. “Come in, Cadet Clyde. Over.”

  He answered immediately.

  “Cadet Clyde speaking. I mean, here. Wait, present? No, that’s a school thing.”

  “Clyde, don’t worry about the walkie lingo. There’s some serious paranormal activity going on at my house right now, and I need your help!” I said.

  “Cool! Is it our ghost friends from yesterday, back for another party?” he asked. His excitement turned to concern as I explained how the spirits had been messing with me all day—making me lose the video game, causing Charles to freak out, and making my homework disappear.

  “But it’s not just me, Clyde. The spirits are after my sisters, too. I think they want us out of our house,” I said.

  “Wait, back up,” Clyde said. “Did you say Lori is in danger?”

  “Well, technically we all are, but yes—” I started to say.

  “I’m on my way!” Clyde shouted. Through the walkie-talkie, I heard him break into a run.

  Clyde was at my house in a flash, decked out in his ARGGH! gear and balancing a plate of snickerdoodles in his bike basket. I ran down the driveway to meet him.

  “You made it!”

  “I brought these to comfort Lori,” he explained, holding up the cookies.

  “You can give them to her later—she’s keeping safe in the garage with the rest of my sisters. Right now, we’ve got some angry spirits to deal with,” I said, squaring my shoulders and heading toward the house. Clyde hesitated, then ran over to put the cookies by the garage door before joining me again.

  “Right behind you, Cadet Lincoln!”

  Clyde and I stood on the back steps, peering in through the dog flap. The darkened kitchen was silent again.

  “This is where the spirits had been last,” I whispered. “But I don’t see any signs of them now. Come on.” I pushed open the door and tiptoed inside. The kitchen seemed empty, but one glance at my EMF detector told me otherwise. The needle was stuck once more at the highest reading. I showed Clyde.

  “They’re still here somewhere,” I said.

  Just then, we heard a familiar sound coming from the living room: it was the same scraping and squelching from last night.

  “It’s them!” I said.

  “To the chimney!” Clyde cried. We broke into a run for the living room, but once we got there, the sounds were already moving upward.

  “Scratch that—to the attic!” Clyde said. “Sounds like they’re returning to their favorite spot.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s time to show them it’s not theirs,” I replied. “Let’s go!” With a rallying cry, we raced
up to the second floor, wrenched down the trapdoor, and charged straight up the attic stairs.

  The scene in the attic was complete chaos. Gone was the fun and breezy party atmosphere. The furniture wasn’t dancing—it was slamming against the walls and floor. Cold and hot air currents ripped through the attic, whipping the dust into miniature cyclones. The strange little song from yesterday had been replaced with angry voices and bloodcurdling screams.

  “Leeeave … ouuur home nowww. … Get ouuut.”

  I wanted to turn and run back out, but I couldn’t. Clyde and I were ARGGH! cadets. If we didn’t stop the spirits, who would?

  I leapt onto the dress-up trunk and shouted into the chaos, “Hey, spirits!” The trunk started rattling, but I held on tight, refusing to budge. “Who do you think you are, trying to scare my family?”

  Clyde jumped up onto the trunk next to me. “Yeah! Tell ’em, Lincoln!”

  The furniture kept slamming against the floor, and the lights began to flicker. The angry voices got louder and louder. I shouted with all my might.

  “This is our house, too! And if you can’t share it with all us Louds, then you can’t stay! My sisters may be loud and crazy, but I’d much rather live here with them than with a bunch of jerks like you!”

  And just like that, the slamming and flickering and screaming stopped.

  Clyde and I looked at each other. Was it over? Were they gone? I started to breathe a sigh of relief, when I heard a faint, eerie giggle. Clyde and I whipped around—only to see Lola and Lana fall out of a nearby closet.

  “What are you guys doing up here? You could have gotten hurt!” I cried, alarmed. But then I heard more giggles, and turned to see the rest of my sisters stepping out from behind furniture, screens, and boxes.

  Clyde and I looked at each other again, flabbergasted.

  “You guys are the ghosts? But … how?” I asked. “And more importantly, why?”

  “Because you were being a huge jerk!” Lola blurted out.

  “What Lola means is that this is our house, too, and we thought you might need a reminder of that,” Lori said, stepping out from behind the wardrobe. Beside me, Clyde gasped and started stuttering.

  “L-L-Lori,” he mumbled. Thinking fast, I shoved a beanbag under him just as he passed out.

  “Yeah,” Lana chimed in. “It didn’t take us long to realize what you were up to yesterday, trying to kick us out of every room.”

  “And then making up the most ridiculous lie ever about Flip’s!” Lori added. “I mean, when would he ever give away passes to Dairyland? He’s literally the cheapest guy in town.”

  “But he gave you guys free Flippees,” I said defensively. My sisters laughed.

  “No he didn’t. We just made that up so you would think we’d actually left,” Luan explained.

  “But … but … you had the Flippee cup!” I said to Lynn, completely confused.

  “I just grabbed an old one from the back of Vanzilla. There were like fifty in there.” She shrugged.

  “So wait—how did you guys get up to the attic? I never saw you go back inside the house,” I said. Lisa proudly explained that she’d applied her new super-adhesive to the bottoms of their shoes, allowing them to scale the chimney and climb in through the attic window.

  Ah. That explained the “spirit” sounds in the chimney.

  Looking extremely pleased with themselves, my sisters went on to explain how they had created the ghost “party.” The rattling trunk was Lori’s doing—she’d simply set her phone to vibrate, placed it inside the trunk, then hid and kept calling it until we got to the attic.

  “Like I said, this is literally the only place in the house with good reception,” she said.

  Luna pulled out her guitar and played the strange, otherworldly tune for us.

  “I didn’t know guitars could sound like that,” I admitted.

  “I told you, bro, it’s my new whammy bar,” she said. “If you’d stuck around to jam, I could have shown you.”

  Lynn explained how she’d made the furniture “levitate” by using the pulleys from her weight machine. Luan told me she’d filled the wardrobe with balloons from her birthday party gigs. Leni stepped forward and proudly demonstrated how she’d used her blow-dryer to create hot and cold air currents.

  “Now, when are you going to let me try that fauxhawk?” she asked, eyeing my hair critically.

  “Wait a second. What about my EMF detector? It was going crazy,” I said, pulling it out of my pocket. “Actually, it still is,” I added, confused. Lisa scoffed and grabbed it out of my hand.

  “I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, elder brother, but there are about a billion household appliances that can set these puppies off,” she said, then began rattling off a long list. “Microwaves, dishwashers, electric toothbrushes, clock radios, Dad’s karaoke machine—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” I said, taking the detector from her and putting it back in my pocket. “But how did you guys do all that spooky stuff around the house, like when I was playing Acne Blasters?” I figured the cold air currents were Leni’s doing, but what about Charles freaking out?

  Lana grinned. “I told you—Charles can do anything I show him how to do. So I just showed him this!” She got on all fours and started growling at an invisible spot, her teeth bared. Okay, that was pretty convincing. But what about that creepy voice I’d heard in my room, and my disappearing homework? Those definitely couldn’t be explained.

  Just then, a hoarse rasp called out from the floor below. “Leeeave … my … room … now!”

  I jumped, then realized that everyone else was giggling and looking at Luan. She took a little bow and explained that she and Mr. Coconuts had spent lots of time working on throwing her voice. I sighed. And here I was almost feeling sorry for that blockhead.

  “Well, whoever made my homework disappear? That wasn’t cool. I spent hours on that constellation chart.”

  “Fear not,” said Lucy, taking a step forward. “I merely filled your pen with vanishing ink.” She held up her own pen and notebook. “It’s what I use for all my venting so no one can read it. All you have to do to make it visible again is hold it up to a light.” She glanced down at her notebook. “Of course, now that you all know that, I guess I’ll have to destroy this.”

  “But, Lori, you wrote out a letter to Bobby with the vanishing ink, didn’t you?” I asked.

  Lori shook her head. “No, I just told you I had so you’d be even more creeped out. That was literally a blank piece of paper.”

  I sighed. At least this meant I didn’t have to do my star chart over. I could just hand it in with a flashlight so Mrs. Johnson would be able to read it.

  “What about the creepy shadow walking through the dining room?” I tried to think of what else I’d missed.

  “Mr. Sprinkles, doing his best runway walk,” Lola said, hugging her stuffed bear.

  “The moving grandfather clock?” I asked.

  “Team effort with Lori’s cell phone and my guns,” said Lynn, kissing her biceps.

  “The fridge magnets?”

  “Easily manipulated by a much stronger magnet across the room,” Lisa said. “Though our youngest sibling deserves credit for the idea,” she added, patting Lily on the head.

  All that was left to explain was the stuff I hadn’t seen: Mr. Coconuts’s disappearance, the icy shower, the stolen sunglasses …

  “Oh, no one touched Mr. Coconuts. I’d never let that happen,” Luan said.

  “And my shower didn’t really turn cold,” said Luna.

  “And I never actually lost my sunglasses,” chimed in Leni. Then she stopped, felt the top of her head, and frowned. “Oh wait, I guess I did.”

  “So you guys just lied to me?” I said, feeling a little hurt.

  “Well … yeah,” Lori said. “Kind of like how you lied to us to try to get us out of the house.”

  Touché.

  “Lincoln, we get that ghost hunting is important to you, but so are the
things we want to do around the house,” Lori went on. “You can’t just expect us to drop what we’re doing—or worse, trick us into leaving.” The others nodded.

  I looked down, ashamed. I couldn’t believe how selfish I’d been.

  “I’m really sorry, guys. I’ve been a huge jerk. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but—”

  “Of course we forgive you, Linky!” Lola interrupted. “Getting to scare the poop out of you more than made up for your jerkiness!”

  “Plus, you did just say you’d rather live with us than with those ghosts,” added Leni, smiling.

  “I meant it,” I said, smiling back.

  “In the future, just give us a little advance notice, and we’ll be happy to clear out … or share our space with you,” Lori said.

  Behind me, I heard Clyde starting to stir.

  “Um, exactly how much advance notice do you need?” I asked her. Lori narrowed her eyes.

  “Seriously? You’re trying to get rid of me already?”

  “No, it’s just we have about five seconds before Clyde sees you and passes out again,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “I’m going, I’m going!”

  Later, with Lori gone, I explained to Clyde everything he had missed while he was passed out. He mostly seemed impressed with my sisters’ wide range of ghost-faking skills.

  “Wow, a cell phone on vibrate. Genius! Lori is just as clever as she is beautiful.” Clyde sighed, then added, “You know, I’m actually relieved the spirits didn’t turn out to be real. They were way scarier than anything Hunter’s had to deal with on ARGGH!”

  Oh no—ARGGH! I looked at Clyde, panicked.

  “We can’t send in our video. It’s all fake!”

  “But it’s already been submitted.” Clyde gasped, horrified. “We sent fraudulent footage to Hunter Spector. He’ll strip us of our ARRGH! cadet credentials!”

  “Maybe they won’t put it on the show,” I said quickly, trying not to freak out. “I mean, they probably got thousands of submissions.”

  “Yeah, but none as awesome as ours. Or as awesome as ours would be if it were real. Which it’s not. Which makes us fakes. Frauds! Phonies!” Clyde was spiraling. I grabbed him by the shoulders and came to a decision.