by Lois Metzger
“Dancing in the dark …” someone was singing. Not only that, something was rattling in time to the song … rattling just a little, but rattling clearly. Pete blinked—blinked again—sat up and peered into the shadows around him. The air in his bedroom was perfectly still—still with a curious, rigid stillness that made him feel that he, along with his bed, was somehow set in glass. No going forward! No going back! Even time was frozen. If there had been a clock in the room, it might have ticked, but it would never have moved on to tocking. And yet there was that rattling … that strange rattling … soft yet sharp as well. What could it be? There was certainly no breeze to rattle any door, to rattle coat hangers in a wardrobe—nothing to make a possibly loose window tremble a little.
“Dancing in the dark …” sang that voice again … that thin voice—a silver thread in the night—and though the sound was close to him in the bedroom, it also seemed to be coming to him across a great distance.
“Who’s there?” Pete shouted. His own voice sounded all shuddery.
Well, that’s okay, he thought. I’m allowed to be frightened by midnight singing in a strange bedroom. There was relief in shouting, even in shaky shouting. “Who’s there?” he yelled again.
The singer stopped singing. The rattling stopped. But now there was a thudding in the hall outside his bedroom, and then his door swung sharply open. Someone turned on the light.
“Pete! Are you all right?” It was his mother. And, close behind her, peering nosily around her was his big sister, Gwen.
“He’s probably got all scared, what with being in a strange house,” said Gwen, sounding as if she were a grown-up talking about a mere toddler.
“I heard a funny sort of singing. Were you singing?” Pete asked, though he knew very well that the thin voice had not been a family one.
“No one was singing,” said Pete’s mother. “You must have been dreaming.”
Pete was certain he had not been dreaming. His new bedroom was completely empty, yet only a moment ago someone had been sharing the room’s darkness with him, singing and rattling in the night. He looked around, trying to work out just where that song and that faint, rhythmic rattling could possibly have come from. Nothing hanging from the door handle. Nothing rolling around the floor.
“You must have been dreaming,” Gwen went on, as if she knew everything. “Little kids can get scared in a house they’re not used to.”
“I’m not little,” said Pete indignantly. “And I’m not scared,” he added, though, only a moment ago, he had certainly been terrified.
“You could sleep with Mom and Dad for the first nights,” Gwen suggested, using that big-sister-comforting-a-baby voice. Pete hated it when she used that voice on him.
“Okay! Just dreaming!” he said quickly, though he was sure he had been wide-awake all the time, and listening with everyday ears, not dream ones.
“Well, call out again if you do have nightmares,” his mother told him. “A new house can be a bit spooky to begin with.” She gave him a hug. “I’ll leave the door open a little bit and turn on the light in the hall.”
The light was comforting, but Pete took a long time to go to sleep again. He lay there, remembering his fear and staring suspiciously toward his half-open door, thinking he might hear that thin song or that slight, rhythmic rattling once more. He could not work out just why that rattling had seemed so terrifying. After all, it was a rattling world. But at last, tired out from puzzling about it all, he fell asleep again and did not wake up until morning.
All family days were busy days, but the next day was particularly demanding. There was unpacking to do. Some things they needed to use while staying in this house, even though it was so completely furnished. Other boxes had to be repacked and stored in a spare room. Moving backward and forward, Pete looked up at those rib-rafters and imagined for a moment or two that he and his family were renting space in the belly of a monster merely disguised as a house. All the same, they worked together, they laughed together, they broke for lunch, worked again, and then had dinner, after which they settled down to watch television. It seemed odd to be watching familiar programs and commercials inside a man-eating house, but there was something comforting about familiar TV figures floating and flickering in the room with them.
“Heigh-ho! Bedtime for boys,” said Pete’s father at last. “Think you’ll get by without any bad dreams tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Pete said, and saw Gwen grinning at him. “I’m not scared,” he added defiantly.
“Well, it’s a fine night tonight,” said his mother. “Before you put on your pajamas, come out on the veranda and watch the moon rising. It’s nearly full.”
“Ghosts love a full moon,” said Gwen, looking slyly at Pete.
“That’s enough of that, Gwennie,” said Pete’s father, just a little crossly. “You’ll make me nervous next, and then I’ll be the one to have bad dreams.”
“I’m not scared,” Pete insisted yet again. “If a ghost did come into the room, I’d just talk to it. I’d say, ‘Hello! Nice to meet you!’” As he said this, it suddenly seemed to him that being kind and polite might be a good way of coping with a ghost.
As it happened, he went to sleep quickly, tired out by all the sorting and shifting. But then, sometime much later, he woke up again, just as he had the night before. He did not open his eyes immediately but, under his eyelids, his eyes felt wide-awake. And his ears were wide-awake, too, hearing, once again, that strange rhythmic rattling and that thin voice singing its song.
“Dancing in the dark!” it sang. “Free to dance! Free to dance!”
The warm bed grew suddenly chilly around Pete. The sheets seemed to be spun out of ice. He tried to lie as still as possible … tried to make himself believe he was dreaming … tried to pretend he was still warm. But in the end he opened his eyes, sat up, and stared into that midnight bedroom. Well, he just had to.
The curtains were not quite drawn. Moonlight struggled through the gap and the glass behind it, lighting up part of the room. And—there was no doubt about it—something was dancing backward and forward across that band of moonlight, something that rattled in time to its own dancing.
Bones!
Bones spinning in the narrow shaft of silver, bones bowing to their own reflection in a mirror set in the wardrobe door, bones that rattled and clicked as they danced. Moonlight picked out grinning teeth, seeming to shift them a little, parting them to let that thin silver voice out into the room. Pete was looking at a dancing skeleton.
He stared at it, horrified. He tried to tell himself he really must be dreaming, but he knew he wasn’t. There really were bones in his bedroom, spinning and rattling, singing and dancing. His mouth dropped open. He screamed out in fear.
Immediately the skeleton stood still. It stared back at him out of eye sockets, empty of eyes but flooded with a blackness even blacker than the blackness of the bedroom night. Pete knew the skeleton was using that blackness inside its skull to look at him. But once again, anxious footsteps were sounding in the hall. Once again, he had woken up his parents—probably Gwen as well.
The skeleton flung out its arms. The shadows in the room moved in as if it had beckoned them, and it vanished. The bedroom door burst open. Someone turned on the light. It was Pete’s father this time. And there was Gwen, close behind him.
“Oh, dear!” Pete’s father was murmuring. “More bad dreams?”
Pete did not know what to say. If he explained that a skeleton had been dancing and rattling in the moonlight at the foot of his bed, who would believe him? Those bones had been frightening—but impossible. After all, if Gwen had tried to tell him that she had seen a ghost dancing under the rib-rafters, he would not have believed her. The horror of it was entirely his own.
“I did have a bit of a dream,” he mumbled, and was amazed to hear how his words came panting out. He sounded like a boy who had been running uphill, barely escaping from something savage snapping at his heels.
�
��That’s two nights,” said Gwen. “Bad dreams are moving in on you.” To his surprise, she actually sounded as if she were sorry for him.
Morning finally came, and with morning came breakfast, which was always reassuring. As he ate some toast, Pete found himself staring at the picture above the fireplace—the picture of that overdressed girl.
“I wonder what her name was,” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Gwen. “I know she died when she was a kid—and I know she died when she was—well, probably soon after that picture was painted.”
“Died? How did she die?” asked Pete, looking at the picture with dismay.
“I think she drowned,” said Gwen. “She fell into the river, and she was wearing too many clothes to swim in. They weighed her down under the water, and it took people a long time to find her again.”
“How do you know?” asked Pete, trying to look at her as if she were tricking him.
“Because I was here with Mom the first time she came here,” Gwen said. “And I asked the lady this house belongs to. That picture girl is sort of related to her in some way … she was a great-aunt or something … and her story belongs to this house.”
Pete sighed.
“This house …” he repeated, almost like an echo. “I reckon it’s a bit doomed, even if it does have velvet cushions and all that stuff.”
“It’s a great house,” Gwen cried indignantly, and Pete, who had almost been ready to tell her about the dancing midnight skeleton, fell silent.
That night, when Pete went to his bedroom, he stood for a moment, looking over at the window. Then, with shaky but determined hands, he pulled the curtains open before scrambling into bed. And that night he did not go to sleep but lay awake in the dark, staring toward the slot of window, watching and wincing but determined to work things out. Moonlight began to edge into his room. Pete sighed and swallowed. The moonlight spread a little.
Maybe it was a dream, he thought. Maybe there’s nothing to solve.
But, as he thought this, he felt the room change around him … felt the air somehow thicken, imprisoning him in shadow. And then the skeleton appeared, standing in the shaft of moonlight, holding bony fingers up in the air.
Now! Pete told himself. Now! Before you have time to be scared!
“I know who you are!” he said quickly. “You’re the girl in the picture over the fireplace.” He was only guessing, but as he said this, he suddenly felt sure that he was right.
The skeleton whirled and, as it whirled, it nodded. Moonlight stroked the smooth top of the skull. Amazingly, that thin voice came out of its grinning teeth—that curious, distant, out-of-tune voice struggling to make itself heard.
“You can see me,” it said. “No one else sees me. They feel me dancing by, but they can’t see me. You must be special.”
“You’re the bones—the bones of that girl in the picture, aren’t you?” Pete said again, trying to keep his own voice steady. “You’re her ghost.”
“This was my room once,” said the ghost. “But I was never allowed to dance back then. I wasn’t allowed to sing. My grandmother wanted me to be—to be serious about life, and she was the one in charge of me. Oh, she was a real witch of a grandmother, she was. And this room was my prison.”
“I think I’d like this room,” said Pete. “Well, I’d like it if I could sleep in it. But you come haunting and waking me up with your singing.”
“I used to sing in here, but if my grandmother heard me, she’d thump on the door to shut me up. She was sad, so sad, and she wanted me to be sad as well. She thought being happy was not quite respectable.”
“Is it—is it strange being a ghost?” Pete asked cautiously. “Is it strange being—being worn down to bones?”
The ghost spun on its toes. Pete thought it might break apart.
“But I love being bones,” the ghost cried out in its strange voice—that voice without any breath in it. “Back when I was real, in your sort of way, everything I wore was made to tie me in or weigh me down. Even my skin felt like a prison to me.” The ghost flung its arms wide. “But bones turned out to be my freedom. Free of tight coats! Free of heavy flesh! Now I can dance … dance … dance. Now I can sing. And now, at last, at last, I’m truly free. I’ve been set free by you.”
“By me?” Pete asked. “Free?”
“Free!” repeated the ghost voice. “Yes! Free! I have been so tied down by my story … tied into this room, that is. I have tried to talk to people … tried to sing my story to them … but most people can’t hear, and the people who can hear won’t listen. Bones frighten them. But you—you have listened to me, so now I have told someone—I have told you. And suddenly all that heavy past is dissolving. Dissolving! I can feel it. And I am dissolving, too. I’ll get beyond being bones. I shall become part of that tree by the window—part of the garden out there. I’ll become buds and boughs. I’ll have a partner … the wind. I’ll dance and sing with the wind. People will breathe me in and feel suddenly happy without knowing why.”
As she said this, Pete heard wind blowing around the corner of the house, rustling in the leaves of the tree out there, which scraped its branches against the window, so that he looked toward the window for a moment. And when he looked back, the skeleton-ghost was gone. Gone from the room, at any rate. Perhaps she had really broken out at last … become part of that tree tapping at the window, part of the summer garden, dancing with the wind … there and not-there.
“Funny!” Pete said softly to himself, staring into the empty moonlight. “Funny-strange, that is. Funny-strange to think that being bones might mean you were let loose—turned free to dance and sing. Funny-strange!”
And then he went to sleep and did not wake up until morning, when sunlight pushed into his room, and the tree outside his window tapped at the glass, just as if it were a good friend inviting him out into a new day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Gabrielle Balkan, Linda Ferreira, Elizabeth Krych, Janet Kusmierski, Arthur A. Levine, Judy Newman, Andrea Davis Pinkney, and Roy Wandelmaier at Scholastic, and to Susan Cohen, Ellen Datlow, and Lauri Hornik …
… and to the masterful writers in this book, who know, better than anybody, the thrill of a good scare and how to take you for the ride of your life.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Todd Strasser
Todd Strasser is the author of more than 130 books for teens and middle graders, including the Help! I’m Trapped In … series, and numerous YA novels, including The Wave, Give a Boy a Gun, Boot Camp, If I Grow Up, and his latest, a thriller, Wish You Were Dead. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and he has also written for television; for newspapers, such as The New York Times; and for magazines, such as The New Yorker and Esquire. The story “YNK” was inspired by his children, who insisted that he learn how to send and receive text messages.
Help! You’re Trapped in Todd Strasser’s Body is now at www.toddstrasser.com or at http://toddstrasser.blogspot.com.
David Levithan
David Levithan is more spooked by ghost stories than he is by actual ghosts. He has yet to see a ghost in his own apartment … but you never know. If he finds one, he’ll let you know on www.davidlevithan.com.
Elizabeth C. Bunce
Elizabeth Bunce has loved ghost stories since her nights huddled under the covers with a flashlight and a book. For this collection, Elizabeth wanted to tell a story about the only spooky thing that ever really gave her the creeps: the hand of glory. This old European legend has been around for hundreds of years, but it first became a charm for thieves in eighteenth-century England. “In for a Penny” is set in the Gold Valley, the imaginary world of Elizabeth’s first novel, A Curse Dark as Gold. Curse, which retells the story of Rumpelstiltskin with a ghostly twist, received the ALA’s first William C. Morris YA Debut Award in 2009 and was named a Smithsonian Notable Book for Children.
Elizabeth is hard at work on a new novel, which, like “In for a Penny,”
is about a thief who finds herself in over her head. She lives near Kansas City, Missouri, with her attorney, her dogs, and a boggart who steals books. Visit her Web site at www.elizabethcbunce.com.
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Over the past twenty-some years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has written adult and young-adult novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel won a Stoker award, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a 2009 Nebula.
Nina’s young-adult novel Spirits That Walk in Shadow and short science-fiction novel Catalyst came out in 2006. Fall of Light was published in May 2009.
Nina does production work for the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Oregon with several cats and many strange toys.
About “Growth Spurt,” she says: “I went away to camp for six weeks the summer of my twelfth year, and I did a lot of changing over that summer—some of my clothes didn’t fit me by the time I got home. I didn’t find a magic answer to help me, unless you count making up stories.”
For a list of Nina’s publications, check out: http://ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.
Richard Peck
Richard Peck’s newest novel, A Season of Gifts, is third in the saga featuring Grandma Dowdel. A Long Way from Chicago won the 1999 Newbery silver medal, and A Year Down Yonder won the 2001 Newbery gold medal.
Both A Long Way from Chicago and his Civil War novel, The River Between Us, were National Book Award finalists.
More of his short stories are collected in Past Perfect, Present Tense, his 2004 collection that includes “Five Helpful Hints” for writing the short story.