Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18

by Paul Hutchens

  Big Jim had just finished loading the .22. I was surprised to see him hand it over to Circus, just as Little Jim called out in an anxious voice, “What you going to do—shoot the dogs?”

  “Wait and see—and listen,” Circus said. The next thing I knew he had the gun to his shoulder. He was pointing it up toward the branches of the tree and sighting as though he was going to shoot something. I thought different things, such as maybe he had already seen the coon and was going to shoot it.

  “Now, listen, everybody!” Circus ordered, and we did.

  Both dogs stopped chopping, and both of them had their eyes on Circus and the gun, waiting for him to shoot. He didn’t but just kept on pointing while all of us listened—which is the way to get a coon dog to stop barking.

  I didn’t know what I expected to hear, if anything—maybe the rubbing together of the branches of the big elm trees overhead, the groaning sounds that we’d heard one day during the summer, or else maybe the scratching of a coon’s claws on the bark of the tree, if there was a coon and if it might be still climbing higher.

  Of course, Dragonfly was probably listening for a ghost, although when he’d found out that the sound his mother had heard was either old Blue Jay or Blackie bawling along Sugar Creek, he hadn’t been so sure that there was a ghost.

  If anybody had been actually in the old stone house looking out through one of the dirty windows, he could have seen a very interesting gang of different-sized, different-looking boys.

  If he’d looked at Little Jim, he’d have seen one of the cutest kids that ever wore a brand-new, brown plaid zipper jacket. Little Jim had both his hands shoved into the jacket’s side pockets, and I could tell by the two bulges they made that his fists were doubled up, which meant he was maybe kind of nervous and also a little bit afraid, although if his fists were doubled up he might feel braver than if they weren’t.

  Dragonfly just that second was holding a red handkerchief up to his nose, maybe trying to stop a sneeze. It was the kind of handkerchief that is very large, almost two feet square, like the bandanas farmers and hunters sometimes use. Even some of the women and girls around Sugar Creek used them—only not to stop sneezes but to wear on their heads, the way they do scarves.

  Poetry had on a heavy, red sheep-lined corduroy coat that had its zipper unfastened and was hanging open because he was pretty hot after our chase. His red corduroy cap had its ear flaps turned up, and one of his ears was flopped over.

  I was thinking those things about how different ones of us looked or would look to anybody inside that old house—or even to a ghost if there was one. Also, there was a quick flash of thought in my mind that wondered why everybody always thought a ghost had to wear something white and long like a bedsheet, instead of ordinary clothes.

  All of a sudden, while everything was as quiet as death, I heard a banging noise, a little like a gun going off, and also like a door slamming somewhere. I knew it wasn’t Circus’s gun. The sound came from the house itself.

  We all jumped as if we had been shot at, and I quickly flashed the light of my flashlight in the direction of the old house. We had all heard it, and I guess we all also saw what we saw at the same time. Anyway Dragonfly and I did, because we both said in scared whispering voices, “Sh! There’s a light in the old house!”

  Imagine that! First a banging noise like a door slamming, and then suddenly it happens—on a very dark night when you’re thinking about a ghost anyway and are out in a lonely forest just outside a house that some people believe is haunted. There in front of your eyes as you look through a dirty window-pane not more than thirty feet from you, you see a light of some kind!

  What to do, or what not to do, was the question.

  Dragonfly was the first to speak—half yell, rather—exclaiming, “It’s a real ghost! Let’s get out of here!”

  Well, as anybody knows, when one boy catches the measles, and there are a lot of other boys around when he does, the other boys are bound to get the measles too. So when Dragonfly let out a scared yell, saying, “It’s a real ghost! Let’s get out of here!” his being scared was as contagious as measles. I’ll have to admit that I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could myself.

  You know a boy would rather be brave than most anything else—anyway, he can’t stand to have anyone think he is a coward, and sometimes he’ll say he isn’t scared even when he is. He doesn’t even stop to think it isn’t the truth when he says, “ Me scared? Don’t be silly!”

  Sometimes on a rainy day when I’m out in our barn sitting by an open window and the rain is pouring down on our shingled roof and I am cracking and eating black walnuts, I like to imagine I am two boys instead of one. I talk and argue with myself about different things. Old Man Paddler, who tells all kinds of interesting stories about the Sugar Creek of long ago, sometimes tells us that a Christian boy has what the Bible calls two natures. One of them is bad, and the other is good. The good one is called the new nature, which only saved people have, and it’s up to us whether we live a good life or a bad one.

  Well, when we heard that noise inside the house, part of me was scared, and the other part of me said it was silly to be scared, that there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost. But when Dragonfly started to run back toward the creek, yelling for us to follow him, before I knew I was going to do it, I had turned and was shooting after him as fast as the arrow making a beeline for Old Tom the Trapper’s chest.

  But we got stopped with Big Jim’s gruff half-brave and half-scared voice barking at us savagely, saying, “Stop! Let’s don’t be a bunch of silly superstitious cowards! Let’s go inside and see what’s going on in there!”

  8

  When Big Jim says something like that to us, there isn’t a member of the Sugar Creek Gang that’s too afraid to stick with him.

  Of course, a light inside the house could mean only one thing, I thought. There had to be somebody in there that could turn on a flashlight, because that’s exactly what the light had looked like when I’d seen it.

  We had a hard time making the hounds keep still. They were absolutely sure that the “whatever it was” was up the tree. But if it had been, it certainly wasn’t up there anymore, I thought. We’d shined our lights all around up in the tree and hadn’t spotted a thing that looked like an animal. Since it was the fall of the year with all the branches bare of leaves, if any wild animal had been up there we’d have seen it.

  “You m–mean w–we are g–going inside?” Dragonfly stammered, right after Big Jim had said we were.

  Big Jim, who wasn’t afraid of much of anything said, “We are! Everybody follow me.” With that he picked up his lantern and started around the side of the house to where we knew there was a door.

  “How’ll we get in?” Poetry asked in his squawky, ducklike voice—which for some reason seemed extra squawky.

  And Big Jim answered, “I’ve got a key.”

  “A key!” I said and so said several of us at the same time. “Where’d you get a key?”

  “Old Man Paddler gave it to me,” he said. “He bought this old house last month, and he has hired my dad and me to come in and clean it up. He’s going to make a Sugar Creek Gang Bible camp out of it, and every year in the summer there’ll be a special camp for boys, who can come from all over the country and stay here for almost nothing.”

  That certainly sounded great to me. It would be a grand thing if every boy in the world could go to a Bible camp once or twice while he was still a boy.

  But right that minute, when there was a ghost in the old house waiting to jump out at us any minute, there wasn’t any time to think about a boys’ camp, especially since Big Jim had the key out of his pocket and was walking right up to that door to unlock it.

  For a change, the hounds were quiet. In fact, they were right behind and between different ones of us. I noticed old Jay had the hair on his back standing straight up, which is the way a dog’s hair acts when there is a strange human being around or else a stray dog or cat or somet
hing else.

  First, Big Jim knocked on the old door, which is good etiquette. It is polite and also good sense for a boy to always knock on a door and wait for an answer before going in.

  I held my breath, remembering the banging noise that we’d heard a few minutes before and also the light I’d seen inside when I looked through the very dirty glass window.

  Knock-knock-knock-knock—four firm, half-fierce knocks, like a policeman’s knocking on a gangster’s door. I knew that Big Jim was maybe imagining himself to be a policeman or a detective or a sheriff, which boys always like to pretend to be anyway.

  Even the hounds kept quiet as we all listened.

  “Open up!” Big Jim said and knocked again.

  And then, as clear as broad daylight, I heard a sound from inside the house—a banging noise like the one we’d heard before.

  Beside me, Blue Jay got a low fierce growl in his throat. And Blackie, standing beside Circus, who held him by his collar, had a growl in his throat also, and his coal-black hair was straight up on his back.

  Boy oh boy, what was going to happen next? I wondered.

  And then Big Jim called in a gruff voice, “We’re coming in!” He shoved the key into the lock and turned it—or rather tried to, but it wouldn’t turn.

  “The lock’s rusted, I’ll bet you,” he said as he tried it again and again.

  Well sir, try as we would, we couldn’t get that door unlocked.

  “We’ve got to get inside,” Big Jim said. “We’ve got to prove to ourselves that there isn’t any such thing as a ghost. Besides, I don’t think anybody heard a banging noise anyway. When a guy’s afraid of a ghost, everything he hears sounds like one!”

  And I remembered again what Dad had quoted from some Greek guy who’d lived a long time ago: “To him who is in fear, everything rustles.”

  “But I saw a light,” I said. “I know I did.”

  “Anybody else see a light?” Big Jim asked over his shoulder, and Dragonfly stuck up for me by saying, “ I did. It went on and off like a flashlight.”

  Since the key wouldn’t unlock the door, we went around and tried different windows to see if they’d open, and they wouldn’t.

  Then Circus spied a broken stairway that looked as if it led down to a cellar. He made a dive down the steps and gave a shove to the very old door at the bottom. The door gave a little. He shoved again, and it burst open.

  We all decided to go down into the cellar to see if there was any ghost down there. And that’s how we happened to get up into the house itself. While we were down in the creepy old cellar, which was musty and had spiderwebs stretched across its corners and hanging from its ceiling, we found another stairway going up. When we pushed on the door in the ceiling at the top of the stairs, we found that it was loose. We shoved it up a little, and, sure enough, it was what we thought it was—a trapdoor that led right up into one of the rooms of the old haunted house.

  In less than almost no time, with our hearts pounding with excitement, we had clambered up that rickety stairway and were inside.

  It certainly wasn’t anything much to look at—just a room that had maybe been a kitchen, another that had probably been a living room, and another a bedroom or a dining room or something, and two other big wide rooms, each one having loose plaster and cobwebs and dirt on the floor and some old-fashioned chairs.

  We shined our lights all around to see what we could see, while Jay with his blue ticks all over him and Blackie scurried from room to room ahead of us, smelling everything and every corner to see if they could smell anything suspicious, which both of them seemed to, because they still acted excited and worried and kept sniffing at the walls and whimpering.

  I studied Big Jim’s face to see if he was worried, and he wasn’t. In fact, his face had a kind of a smirk. “Well,” he said in a bored voice, “we know what caused the light Bill thought he saw, and now if we can find out what made the noise Dragonfly thought he heard, we will have proved there isn’t any ghost.”

  It made me mad to hear him calmly say that. I knew I’d seen a light flash on and off, and it didn’t feel very good to have my idea squelched and be made to look like a dope, so I said, “You don’t know anything of the kind.”

  “Oh, I don’t, don’t I?” Big Jim said. He flashed his light over toward a wall and onto an old rectangular mirror hanging there.

  “See that!” he said. He flashed his light on and off a few times, and I saw the reflection of his light in the mirror. I noticed also that the mirror was in line with the window, and I knew that when I was outside and had flashed my light into the window that it had shone onto this old mirror. It had been the light of my own flashlight I’d seen. I was disgusted, because I wanted there to be somebody inside this old house.

  Of course, it didn’t matter so much that Dragonfly had thought he heard a banging noise. We all expected him to hear things.

  “You’ll have to prove to Jay and Blackie that they don’t smell anything then,” I said. “Look at ’em. They’re acting awfully funny.”

  And they were. Right that second, Blue Jay, who’d been sniffing and whimpering in a very worried dog voice, came to a stairway that led to the upstairs of the old house. Quick as a flash he started sniffing his way up, with Blackie right after him.

  9

  Imagine that! Old Blue Jay was on his way up a mysterious stairway with Blackie right after him, both of them sniffing at the steps as though they were following some kind of wild animal’s trail. They were going up fast, and I knew that in a jiffy we’d all be following them!

  No sooner had Jay and Blackie disappeared up that spooky stairs and we heard their feet galloping around from room to room, than we were on our way up too.

  It certainly wasn’t much to look at up there. The first room was just a small bare room big enough for a boy’s bed and a dresser. We hurried through that empty little room, on past an open wardrobe door, and came out into a large room that was as empty as the other one and the downstairs had been.

  Blue Jay and Blackie were acting as though whatever they had thought was up here wasn’t here now. They were running from one corner to another, whimpering and not paying any attention to us and worrying in their dog voices. They reminded me of my brown-and-gray-haired mother when she loses a fountain pen or maybe one of her four overstuffed handbags somewhere in the house and can’t find it and is afraid she’s left it somewhere, and all of us, including Dad and me, have to stop what we’re doing or reading or talking or thinking about and help Mom until she finds it right where she thought it was in the first place.

  We looked in the wardrobe, flashing our lights all around, and I noticed that there was a row of wooden pegs sticking out of one wall about as high as Big Jim’s head, which I decided were used to hang people’s clothes on.

  “Nothing but a row of wooden clothes hangers,” I said and reached up and caught hold of one, remembering there were pegs like them in our barn at home that the men who had built our barn had used to pin some big logs together.

  I used to catch hold of the ones in our barn and hoist myself up on top of a high log and then use the log for an imaginary springboard from which I turned flip-flops on the hay. That is, I used to until one day Dad caught me at it and made me stop, saying gruffly, “William Collins, that hay is the horses’ and cows’ meat and potatoes and Jello pudding! How would you like some wild animal to roll and tumble around all over your supper just before you ate it?” For some reason I hadn’t wanted to hear that because it spoiled my playing in the hay, and for a few minutes I wasn’t only cross at Dad but at both our horses and cows for being so particular about their food.

  Before I got through thinking those terribly fast thoughts, Little Jim interrupted me by saying, “Look! There’s a peg real low down for a boy to hang his coat on.”

  Sure enough there was. It was about three feet from the wardrobe’s floor, away over in a corner all by itself. Little Jim was always noticing something like that, I thought, things th
at none of the rest of us saw.

  “I’ll bet the little boy liked to live in this nice big house,” Little Jim said, and when I looked at him he had a faraway expression in his eyes as though he wasn’t even with us but his thoughts were back in the days of long ago. Maybe he was even imagining himself to be that little boy and hanging his brand-new brown plaid zipper jacket on that little round peg in the corner of the wardrobe.

  Right away we started looking all around the large room, which didn’t even have a mirror hanging on its wall. We searched through the drawers of a very old-looking writing desk, which was the only furniture the upstairs had. There wasn’t a thing in them, although one drawer looked as if a mouse or maybe twenty-five or thirty mice had been using it for a place to play roughhouse. Some old newspapers on the bottoms of the drawers had been chewed to small pieces.

  Just as Big Jim slammed the last drawer shut, it made a banging noise, and Dragonfly cried out excitedly, “There! That’s what I heard —that banging noise. There was somebody up here awhile ago.”

  Well, it was a ridiculous idea, and we said so.

  Big Jim opened and shut the drawer a half dozen times to show Dragonfly his idea was crazy. Then, looking at his watch, he said all of a sudden, “Say, our folks will be worried about us. We’d better beat it for home!” With that, he started back toward the other room and the stairs.

  But Dragonfly must have felt he was being belittled, and he wasn’t satisfied. He said, “You guys don’t give a ghost a ghost of a chance to prove that he is a ghost. Don’t you know ghosts have to have it pitch-dark before you can see them?”

  Well, it was an idea, and we took Dragonfly up on it. Big Jim lifted his kerosene lantern to the level of his eyes, turned the wick down, pressed on the lever that lifted the globe, gave a quick puff of breath, and out went his lantern. Circus did the same thing to his. “OK, gang, off with all your flashlights, and everybody be quiet and listen and look for all you’re worth and see if anybody sees a ghost.”