The Haunting of Heck House

by Lesley Livingston

  “Yup,” Pilot said, struggling to keep a straight face. “I can see what your problem is. That there is one defunct speaker.”

  “Oh … never mind.” Cheryl glowered at the speaker.

  “If you want, I can take it apart and see what the trouble is once Pops and me are done with the projector repairs,” Pilot offered good-naturedly as he pulled up a stool to the work table and plunked himself down on it.

  “No!” the girls protested in tandem. What if such meddling released the magician’s spirit? Or—horrible to think—destroyed it altogether?

  “Well, whatever.” Pilot shrugged. “Let me know if you change your minds.”

  Truthfully, Pilot was pretty used to strange behaviour where the twins were concerned, and so their current speaker-based wackiness wasn’t all that provoking. He took a long sip from his bottle of soda and put it down on the table, beside a small stack of envelopes and junk flyers. On top of the pile was the strange invitation the girls had received the day before, and the way the sunlight streaming through the barn door shifted in that instant made the embossed gold lettering seem to gleam and pulse with its own light.

  “Oh …” Pilot winced a bit. “I get it.”

  “Get what?” Tweed asked.

  Pilot gestured at the mail. “I see you two got that invitation that was sent out to some of the sitter kids in town.”

  “Of course we did!” Cheryl said, brandishing the envelope. “It’s an invitation to compete for a super-sitter job!”

  “Yeah, I know.” Pilot raised an eyebrow at the invitation, as if he’d been somehow personally insulted by the little envelope. “And I’m sorry. But, you know. It sounds stupid, and just because you girls can’t go is no reason to start acting all crazy. I’m sure there’ll be other invitations.”

  “What?” Cheryl asked. “What are you talking about? Why are you sorry? Why wouldn’t we go? This Heck Fellow is looking for the best Wiggins has to offer!”

  Pilot looked back and forth between the two girls for a long moment. Then he sighed. “You didn’t read the fine print did you?”

  “What fine print?” Tweed asked ominously.

  Pilot pulled the invitation out of the envelope and pointed to the very bottom. Where there was, in teeny-weeny letters, fine print.

  Participants must be 13 years of age or older.

  “I thought that was just a decorative squiggle,” Tweed muttered, as she reached into a work table drawer and pulled out the magnifying glass the girls had used only the week before to ingeniously pop a kernel of popcorn using only sunlight and patience. Cheryl peered over her shoulder as Tweed hovered the big round glass over the invitation, and together they read the words:

  Participants must be 13 years of age or older.

  Tweed put the magnifying glass down slowly.

  Cheryl stepped back away from the work table. She looked over to where the carnival ride sign stood leaning against the wall. “It’s just like that!” She pointed, her lip quivering a bit. “It’s like we’re not tall enough. We’re not old enough? We’re the best dang babysitters this town has ever seen. AND we saved the town! This? This is a grave injustice and no mistake about it! I mean, y’know, except for the fact that it’s clearly a mistake!”

  There was a rebellious gleam in Tweed’s grey eyes. “I don’t see why we don’t just go anyway.” Her quiet voice, a counterpoint to Cheryl’s more boisterous outrage, was still sharp with emotion.

  “Well, why not?” Cheryl jumped right on board that bandwagon. “Why don’t we? And prove to this whole town and His Lordship Heckenfrankenfurter, or whatever his name is, that we are the best. Thirteen or not thirteen!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Pilot exclaimed, alarmed by the head of steam that was gathering between the two of them. “You girls really haven’t thought this through. I mean—for one thing—d’you honestly think Pops is going to let you two out for a whole night in a strange house? He probably wouldn’t let you, even if you were thirteen!”

  The girls exchanged a mutinous glance and Pilot shook his head in exasperation.

  “Aw, c’mon!” he said. “It sounds like a whole buncha fuss for nothing. And you don’t want to hang out with them anyway—”

  “Them?” Cheryl asked pointedly.

  “Oh, uh, yeah …” Pilot huffed a heavy sigh and rolled his eyes heavenward, figuring out just how badly Cheryl and Tweed were going to take the news. “I kinda heard Hazel Polizzi talking to Cindy Tyson about the stupid thing this morning. They were hanging out around the ice cream shop when I went to the hardware store to pick up some WD-40 and this new monkey wrench.” He plucked the wrench out of the denim loop in his overalls and twirled it on his finger like a gunslinger.

  Tweed’s gaze narrowed. “What were they saying?”

  “That they were going to corner the Wiggins sitter market …” he said, “baby, pet and house—the whole kids and kaboodles!—after they aced the contest.”

  Tweed ground her teeth and Cheryl snorted in barely suppressed fury.

  “They seemed pretty pleased with themselves.” Pilot shook his head, an expression of distaste on his face. “Laughing pretty hysterically—joking about all the flyers they’d delivered around town really paying off.”

  “Flyers!?” Cheryl sputtered in outrage. “But … but … that’s our marketing strategy!”

  Tweed’s gaze smouldered with displeasure and her mouth disappeared into a thin line. “Clearly, our success at the Bottoms Boys’ Birthday Bash made an impact on the competition. They’ve decided to play by the rules in the handbook of dirty tricks.”

  “No … girls.” Pilot grimaced. “I don’t think that’s what they meant.”

  “What did they mean?” Cheryl frowned.

  “I think they were making fun of your flyers.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t know why you girls are so bothered by it.” Pilot shook his head. “And I can’t believe their mothers would let them go either. So the whole situation is whaddayacallit. Moot.”

  “Oooh no! There’s nothing moot about this!” Cheryl’s outrage had her lit up like a firecracker. “Whatever that even means! Unless it means outright war! Then it’s super-mooty.”

  “C’mon, girls. Don’t you think there’s something just a bit shady about this?” Pilot plucked up the invitation and gave it a narrow-eyed glare.

  “Pff.” Cheryl waved away his concerns. “Don’t be naïve, Flyboy. That invitation is embossed. You can’t be shady if you’re embossing stuff.”

  “It’s true,” Tweed agreed. “Shadiness would be indicated only if the invitation was handwritten in red ink that far too closely resembled blood.”

  “Right! Don’t you know anything?” Cheryl crossed her arms over her chest. “Besides, it could be a terrific business opportunity!”

  “A high-profile gig like this could really set us up.” Tweed nodded. “Think of the publicity.”

  Pilot shook his head. “I just don’t—”

  “You can come with us if you’re so worried!” Cheryl said.

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing!” Pilot slashed a hand through the air. “I’m not coming with you because you’re not going! Listen. We got off darn lucky last time you two got yourselves in hot water. Imagine what would have happened if Artie had stayed a lizard!”

  Tweed rolled an eye. “Crocodile.”

  “Whatever!” Pilot said, exasperated. “Or if Pops had found out you two had been driving the Moviemobile around town. Or if my mom had woken up to find me and my plane gone in the middle of the night! We’d all have been grounded until were old and grey!”

  A silence descended in the barn in the wake of Pilot’s outburst. Clearly he felt pretty strongly about the subject at hand. Cheryl blinked a few times and then nudged Tweed with her elbow. The cousins exchanged a glance and Tweed turned back to Pilot.

  “You know something, Pilot?” she said solemnly. “You’re right. We don’t have anything to prov
e, do we Cheryl?”

  “Uh … no?” Cheryl tentatively agreed.

  “Well, good,” Pilot said, picking up his wrench and sliding it back into its pocket loop. “I better go. My mom needs me to do some chores, and so Pops and me are gonna knock off the repairs until later today. It oughta be easier to test out the projector around sundown, anyway. We should have that screen up and running by the time the cars start rolling through the gates tonight, in time to deal with all that overflow from another smash-hit top-notch C+T bill. That’s something to take your minds off this house-sitting nonsense, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Sure.”

  Pilot tipped his hat back, tossed the girls a casual wave and said, “Later ’gators!” Then he was gone.

  Cheryl turned and tilted her head at Tweed. “Nothing to prove?”

  “One thing to prove.”

  “And that is?”

  “That we’re the best dang sitters this town has got!”

  4 DIAL S FOR SITTERS

  Sundown seemed like a long way away on a summer day as long and sunny and hot as that one. But there was an awful lot to be done if the twins were going to successfully execute OPERATION: DING DONG. First, the girls had to go and tidy the Drive-In lot and pack away all of their ACTION!! gear. Next, they had to gather up all the sitter implements that they thought they might need for a night on the job. In spite of all their claims to expertise, the girls had never before really sat at a house with no actual living, breathing occupants in it, and so they were somewhat unsure as to what tools of the trade they should pack. For instance, the bag of Double Stuf Oreos they usually considered indispensable as incentives—bribes, really—toward good behaviour amongst their toddler charges would be less than useful in a big old empty house that was free of actual children. And besides, the girls would just wind up eating them all themselves.

  In spite of what they’d said to Pilot, Cheryl and Tweed knew perfectly well that he was right about one thing. Talk turned to the fact that there was, in all likelihood, no way in the world that their grandfather was about to sign off on them spending a whole night in a strange house. They discussed several ways to get around that particular roadblock.

  “Just don’t tell him!” Simon the speaker suddenly piped up with the most obvious solution, from inside his drawer.

  “Gah!” Cheryl jumped at the sudden crackle of sound. She stalked over to the work table and yanked open the drawer. “Where the blazes were you when Pilot was here?”

  “Um.”

  “You made us look like weirdos, y’know,” Tweed said, glaring down at the little metal box. “And that’s something we’re quite capable of doing all on our own. We don’t need your help!”

  “Sorry,” Simon said. “I’m shy.”

  “You’re a bucket of bolts and wires,” Cheryl pointed out. “You can’t be shy.”

  “I was … napping.”

  Tweed didn’t buy it. “Were not.”

  “You told me to be quiet!”

  “And then we told you to say something,” Cheryl said. “You’re kinda lousy at taking direction.”

  “Look. I’m not sure that I’m ready for the world to know about me,” the speaker said. “I mean, except for you fine young ladies, of course. What if the constabulary finds out? Or those mad fiends in the scientific institutes? They’ll want to take me apart to see what makes me tick! Your friend with the monkey wrench there was going to do that very thing!”

  “How come you’re talking to us, then?” Tweed asked.

  “I like you two. Lots of pluck.”

  “Whatever.” Cheryl rolled her eyes and shut the drawer. “Come on, Tweed.”

  “Wait!” Simon’s muffled voice protested. “Take me with you!”

  Tweed wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. “Uh …”

  “Why?” Cheryl asked, pulling the work table drawer back open a crack and peering into its dim confines.

  “I, well, it’s rather embarrassing,” the speaker muttered. “After all, I, the Great Simon Omar, have faced the abyss. I have parted the veils between the worlds of the living and the dead. I have summoned forth the ethereal and the terrible, communed with the spirit plane, dazzled and amazed and—”

  “And you’re afraid of the dark, right?” Tweed asked pointedly.

  “Erm … yes.”

  Cheryl stifled a snort of amusement. But to be fair, she didn’t much care for sleeping in a room without a night light either.

  “Beyond that,” Simon continued in a rush, “you’re going to need me.”

  “Need you?” Cheryl asked. “For what?”

  “Your house-sitting competition!” he said. “Just think of the kind of advantage a man—er, machine—of my particular qualifications could provide!”

  “Well,” she mused, “we’ve already branched out into cat-sitting and, if we manage to book this gig”— she waved the invitation—“house-sitting as well. Speaker-sitting could be just another speciality of C+T Enterprises, I suppose.”

  “Okay then.” Tweed plucked the mystically possessed speaker up out of the drawer and tucked him into the side mesh pocket of Cheryl’s knapsack where he could look out and—if it was actually something he needed to do—breathe. “But we’re taking you with us on one condition. You have to stay quiet unless we tell you to talk. People in Wiggins already think we’re weird enough without us having to explain the likes of you!”

  “Deal,” the speaker said. “Done.”

  “Okay.” Tweed nodded.

  “I’ll be hushed as a mouse.”

  “Good.”

  “Not a peep out of me. Not one magic word.”

  “Fine.”

  “Mum. Dumb. Silent as the grave.”

  “I get it.”

  “Dead quiet.”

  Tweed sighed.

  “Not a whisper of a—”

  “Zip it, Speakie!” Cheryl finally exclaimed.

  Simon Omar crackled with a burst of static in surprise and then lapsed into silence.

  “Geesh,” she said. “For a speaker, he sure talks a lot.”

  Tweed knit her brows together in a frown beneath her bangs. “Are we seriously not going to tell Pops about this?” she asked.

  “If we do, there won’t be any ‘this.’ He won’t let us go.”

  “It’s not fair. Hazel and Cindy are almost the same age as us. And they didn’t just save the town from a supernatural incursion. We did that.”

  “Sure.” Cheryl shrugged. “You know that and I know that and, well, that’s kind of the problem. It’s not like we can tell anyone. Aside from Artie and Pilot, that intel stays classified. Eyes Only. Not only would no one believe us, but they’d think we were funny-farm material. Even more than they already do.”

  “Pops would believe us,” Tweed muttered.

  Pops, they’d always known, didn’t think the girls were crazy.

  “Maybe …”

  “He’d believe us and then he’d ground us.”

  “Yup.” Cheryl felt the sudden rush of a blooming rebellious streak. “But it’s not like this is going to be the same thing. It’s just a big ol’ pile of non-paranormal bricks. No kids and no craziness, right? And it’s not as if we haven’t already proven ourselves in the arena of super-sitting! We can totally handle ourselves.”

  “Sure we can.”

  “Sure you can!”

  “Gah!” Cheryl almost jumped out of her skin yet again. She nudged the speaker in her knapsack sharply with her elbow. “Shh!”

  “I told you! I can be useful. Let me prove it.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve got an idea. A way you two can convince your granddad to let you off the leash for the night.”

  “What can I do for you, Cheryl?” Pops asked, tipping the baseball cap off his head and wiping the sweat from his brow. Tufts of white hair sprouted like dandelion fluff on either side of his head above his ears. He walked over to the refrigerator in the sunny farmhouse kitchen and fetched the big gla
ss pitcher of lemonade that was always kept full on hot summer days and poured himself a glass.

  He gulped thirstily as Cheryl took a deep breath and crossed her fingers behind her back.

  “Well,” she said, “um, me and Tweed wanted to know if you’d be okay with us spending the night at … um … a friend’s place.” She winced involuntarily at the fib and hoped Pops wouldn’t notice. “For a sleepover.”

  Pops tugged his hat back onto his head and frowned faintly. “Tonight?”

  Cheryl nodded.

  Pops scratched at his ear. “That’s awfully short notice, don’t you think?”

  “Um … well … yes,” Cheryl stammered, casting about for just the right words to convince Pops of the benefits of such an outing to his two beloved granddaughters. “But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Well, uh, it’s with Hazel Polizzi,” Cheryl said, not exactly hedging the truth—after all, according to Pilot, their sitter nemesis (and their other sitter nemesis)— had already jumped at the chance to partake in the Hecklestone invite. “And Cindy Tyson’ll be there, too.”

  “Aren’t those young ladies babysitters here in Wiggins, too?” he asked.

  “Exactly!”

  Pops’s frown turned to a look of confusion. “I thought you didn’t get along so good with them.”

  “Oh, heh, that! …” Cheryl laughed a bit too loudly but Pops didn’t seem to notice. “Water under the bridge! Heh! Buried the old hatchet, we did! Very thirteen-years-old for a couple of twelve-year-olds, don’tcha think?”

  “Well, I must say, I’m very proud of you girls.”

  “Thought we’d, uh, celebrate with a, um, professional retreat of sorts. A sleepover sympodium.”

  “I think you mean symposium.”

  “Right! A sitter summit! A meeting of the minders, so to speak.” She was babbling and she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself. If Pops didn’t let them go, then the greatest business opportunity of their young entrepreneurial lives would just slip right through their fingers. “Heh. You know, us girls will trade advice: movie suggestions to soothe rambunctious charges, share some bedtime tips, toddler-tantrum tricks, tooth-brushing techniques … er … Popsicle etiquette …”