Giggling.
“D’you—”
“Shh!” Tweed silenced her cousin and pushed her hair back from her ear, cocking her head and listening. In answer to Cheryl’s unasked question, yes—she clearly heard it, too. The sound of mocking laughter, echoing and distorted, drifted through the house. But the owners of those voices were nowhere to be seen.
The girls stepped out into the corridor and tiptoed back to the main hallway, where the three corridors branched off.
After a moment …
“That way!” Cheryl whispered, pointing down one of the corridors. The girls took off at a silent run. Tweed took the doors on the left side and Cheryl took the ones on the right. There seemed to be dozens of them— almost as if the corridor was growing longer the farther down it they went—but eventually they reached the end. After much turning and jiggling of knobs and peering through darkened keyholes, all the girls learned was that they were all locked. They shared a perplexed moment at the end of the hall and then turned to retrace their steps … only to see that all the doors—every single one of them—now stood wide open.
“What the …?” Cheryl blinked and did a double take.
“Interesting,” Tweed said.
“I’d bet our hourly sitter rate—snacks included— that Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi are behind this.” Cheryl glowered at the shadows painting the hallway in stripes of gloom.
“You think?” Tweed was skeptical. “Isn’t trying to crush us with a piano going just a little overboard? Even for those two?”
“You know, they’re probably freaking out because we totally owned that Bottoms Boys’ Birthday Bash gig,” Cheryl said. “We left them with a lotta cake on their faces. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to forgive us for that any time soon …”
“Yeah, but … a piano?”
“Harsh, I know. But what else could it be? Maybe they just meant to push it to the top of the stairs and lost control. But I think they’re trying to rattle us out with these ‘spooky’ shenanigans.” Cheryl put air quotes around the word spooky, just in case Cindy and Hazel were around somewhere, spying on them and operating under the false impression that she and Tweed were the least bit rattled. Because they weren’t. At all. Not one bit. No siree—
SLAM!!
The door nearest them slammed shut with a resounding crack like a thunderclap and the girls nearly leaped out of their skins and took off down the corridor to the main hall! As they ran, the doors on either side swung closed one after the other— SLAM!!SLAM!!SLAM!!SLAM!!SLAM!!—all the way along. Except for the very last door. Even after they’d made it past, back to the landing at the top of the stairs, it still stood widely … weirdly ... open.
7 A ROOM WITH A BOO!
Cheryl and Tweed exchanged a glance and, communicating through their exclusive series of custom hand signals, agreed to investigate. They backtracked toward the door—crouching low and using the tall dusty vases and hall tables spaced along the walls as cover—and approached with extreme caution. First Tweed poked her head around the door frame, then Cheryl did.
“Okaaay …” Tweed said.
“All riiight …” Cheryl glanced around.
“There’s, um, nothing here.”
“Nope. Nada.”
“Okay, so … what’s the deal? Why is this door open? This room’s mostly empty.”
It was indeed. Furnishings in the room were sparse—a large oak desk stood at the far end of the room facing a marble fireplace, paired with a wingback leather swivel chair. Nearby stood a small round table, draped in a cloth and surrounded by simple wooden chairs. An elaborate crystal chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling, right above a wide open space that looked as though it should have been furnished, but wasn’t. One wall was occupied by tall French doors draped in long white curtains that stirred slightly in a breeze coming from … somewhere. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the other walls, but the bookshelves were empty. Not so much as a dime-store paperback rested on them.
The girls stepped over the threshold into the room, eyes sweeping the corners as if there was definitely something—or someone—hiding there, in plain sight.
“Maybe this was the room the piano came from,” Tweed suggested, waving at the empty expanse.
Cheryl shrugged and took a step farther into the room. When nothing leaped out to attack her, she took another one. Her footsteps were muffled by the thickly woven area rug that resembled a giant chessboard, and only the creak of the floorboards beneath indicated her movement.
“Cool rug,” she murmured, balancing on one foot on a black space, her eyes crossing as she stared at the alternating black and white squares.
“Rug? What rug?” Simon the speaker’s voice came from the depths of Cheryl’s knapsack, loud and crackling and frantic. “Wait! Stop! Both of you. I know you told me to be quiet but you have to trust me on this one— don’t take another step!”
The twins froze—not really because Simon had instructed them to do so, but more because he’d startled them half out of their wits. Still balancing precariously on one foot (she was afraid to put the other one back on the floor after such a dire warning), Cheryl shrugged out of one knapsack strap and reached around into the bag. She pulled the speaker out and frowned at it. The red Spirit Stone was pulsing like a warning alarm.
“Turn me around so I can see the rug.”
“Um, okay … Er, turn you which way now?” Cheryl fumbled a bit with the speaker.
“Point me at the floor,” Simon said in an exasperated tone. “My turban stone. Point the jewel in the direction I need to look.”
Cheryl did as she was told, with a silent Tweed looking on in fascination. The red gleam of the Spirit Stone swept the rug beneath Cheryl’s feet like the beam from a crimson-bulbed searchlight. After a few moments, it stopped and seemed to narrow its focus on a spot on the far side of the room. “Aha!”
“Aha?” Tweed asked.
“I knew it. It’s an old stage magician’s trick.”
“What is?”
“The pattern of the rug is designed to confuse the eye,” Simon said. “And camouflage the trap door beneath.”
“Holy moly! Trap door?” Cheryl handed the speaker over to Tweed, who kept it trained on the corner of the room, and pulled out her trusty mini-golf putter—she’d had the thing for so long the rubber grip had shredded to pieces and fallen off, but she couldn’t bear to part with the hole-in-one guarantee—and tapped the rug in front of her.
“Careful …” Tweed cautioned as Cheryl paced slowly forward. “Careful …”
Beneath the rug, the floor seemed solid enough … until she got to the spot where Simon Omar’s crimson light shone brightest. Then there was a hollow-sounding THUNK. Cheryl dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled slowly forward, sweeping the palms of her hands over the surface of the carpet as she went.
And … there it was! A seam in the carpet, hidden by the pattern, just as Simon said it would be. She worked the ends of her fingernails under the close-fitting fibres and peeled back the edge of a square of the rug. A square that covered a hinged wooden door. The slightest pressure on the surface of the trap and the thing collapsed inward. It snapped back into place, completely invisible to the naked eye, after a few seconds.
Tweed gasped. “Anyone unlucky enough to step on that square of floor would drop into who knows what kind of fiendish trap!”
“A tiger cage!” Simon suggested with gruesome enthusiasm. “Or a dungeon! Or a pit lined with sharpened stakes! Or—”
“Or maybe it’s just a plain old laundry chute,” Cheryl said.
“Well, where’s the fun in that?” the speaker grumbled.
Cheryl snorted. “Since when are dungeons fun?”
Tweed spun Simon around so that she was looking him in the face. Sort of. “If you’re really a real magician,” she asked suspiciously, “then how come you know all about cheap tricks like trap doors and stuff?”
“What? Oh. Um. Well, uh, yes,
” the departed mystic stammered. “My competition, you see! Uh … they were the ones resorting to chicanery and sleight of hand.”
“While you were the one performing real feats of supernatural derring-do, huh?” Tweed raised an eyebrow.
“Exactly!”
“And your final act?” Cheryl said, stepping carefully around the trap door and rejoining her cousin on the other side of the room. “The ‘mystical ka-boom’?”
“That’s right! That’s what it was. An ectoplasmic conflagration born of a catastrophic mystical convergence.”
“Not, say, too much black powder in a flash pot?” Cheryl suggested.
“What do you take me for?” Simon protested haughtily. “A charlatan?”
It was a bit disconcerting the way the speaker almost seemed to exhibit facial expressions. Tweed handed it back to Cheryl and wandered over to the empty bookshelves next to the door. They were coated with a thick layer of dust, but there were also bare patches where rows of books had clearly stood. Recently. She peered closely and discovered a smattering of fingerprints in the dust, too. Made by small hands. She was about to call Cheryl’s attention to them when suddenly, the leather desk chair at the far end of the room creaked.
Cheryl and Tweed froze.
In the silence that descended on the room, they could hear a thin, thready whisper of sound. Like faraway music. As quietly as she could, Tweed stuffed Simon in her knapsack so that she could have both hands free in case emergency hand-to-hand combat was required. Then together, she and Cheryl crept silently toward the other end of the room. The chair was one of those expensive, richly upholstered numbers with the high backs—a perfect perch for an evil villain to spin around on and reveal himself as the mastermind of some nefarious plot …
Well. The twins had seen enough movies to know that you didn’t want a guy like that to get the upper hand. So, instead of waiting for some kind of dramatic reveal, they crept stealthily up behind the chair, ready to give it a good hearty spin. Once in position, Cheryl held up her hand and did a silent three-count with her fingers.
“One … two … thr—”
“Wait!” Tweed mouthed, grey eyes wide.
“What?” Cheryl mouthed back.
“Are we doing one … two … go-on-three?” Tweed asked in a sub-whisper. “Or one … two … three-and-then-go?”
The age-old dilemma.
Cheryl frowned. “Uh …”
Too late! The chair suddenly spun around.
“GAH!!” the girls yelped in tandem and leaped back as the ominous hidden figure revealed himself to be … a fellow babysitter. Wearing headphones—the source of the ghostly music the girls had heard—and playing a video game on a tiny handheld screen.
“Hey, guys!” Karl Wu peeled off his shiny red headphones and bounced up out of the impressive leather chair. “What’s shakin’? You two got that crazy invite, too, huh?”
“Er … yeah,” Cheryl said, composing herself after the near heart failure and glancing sideways at Tweed. “Yeah, we did.”
“And we’re totally allowed to be here,” Tweed said, returning Cheryl’s glance.
“Awesome!” he said. “I thought I was the only one here in this stupid old house and, lemme tell you, the boredom was kicking in big time!”
Karl “Feedback” Wu was known around Wiggins Cross as something of a techno-wizard (and aspiring lead guitarist for an as-yet-unformed but soon-to-be-wildly-popular rock band). He was the same age as Pilot— fourteen—but Feedback sported the kind of perpetually cheery grin and bouncy, wound-up, go-get-’em attitude that made it seem like he was actually a lot younger than that.
The twins didn’t know him all that well, but what they did know of him, they liked. The only thing that tweaked their suspicions was his—in their opinion— over-reliance on technology. The fact that he could walk, talk, text and play cartoon zombie-smasher games on his newfangled phone all at the same time made them wary. The twins, of course, relied on oldfangled technology that was far more trustworthy. Anything with a computer chip in it was, in their eyes, instantly suspect. And probably prone to government (or possibly alien) tracking.
“Hey! I saw your flyers,” he said. “Nice work. Do you guys have a website?”
“Uh …” The twins exchanged another set of nervous glances.
“Tweed doesn’t like spiders,” Cheryl blurted.
“You promised not to tell!” Tweed hissed.
Cheryl grimaced. “Sorry. Bit frazzled here …”
But Feedback didn’t seem to notice the exchange. “Y’know,” he said, jumping out of the chair and wandering into the middle of the room without taking his eyes off the phone in his hand, “I’ve never sat for a place that didn’t have any kids in it before. It’s kinda weird. And I haven’t found a refrigerator yet. Or a kitchen for that matter. And these hallways go on for miles! I thought I was stuck in a maze or something. Feels like I’ve been wandering up and down the same darn corridor for an hour now. Also? I think this place has maintenance issues. And rats. I keep hearing noises in the walls.”
Neither of the twins could get a word in edgewise, but for the moment, that was okay. They needed to gather all the necessary intel they could before they shared their own conclusions about the direness of the situation.
“Have you guys seen Hazel or Cindy yet?” Feedback continued. “I texted them yesterday and they said they were gonna be here, too. Maybe they chickened out. Have you found a TV? Or a sound system? Or a video game set-up? Man, I could totally go for pizza pops …”
“What are you doing?” Cheryl asked finally, pointing to the phone.
“Oh. Looking for a signal.” His sunny demeanour clouded over with a sudden, deeply perplexed frown. “I’ve been trying to pick something up ever since I got here and I don’t get it. I’m not getting anything. Like— capital N nothing. No signal—hey wait! ‘No Signal.’ That’s a great name for a band!” He paused and made a note on his phone and then continued. “I mean, Wiggins Cross has super-crappy wi-fi at the best of times but I customized this baby so that I could pick up a signal from the moon! Only … this house is, like, a totally dead zone.”
“Yeah …” Tweed nodded grimly. “That’s kind of what we’re afraid of.”
A sudden crackling of frost spread across the window next to them as the temperature in the room instantly plummeted.
“Whoa,” Feedback said, and the girls could see his breath. “Old Mr. H better get the heating/cooling system serviced in this dump. That a/c is turned up way too high …”
There was another crackling sound—only this time it came from overhead—and Cheryl dove for Feedback, shouldering him out of the way just as the room’s overhead chandelier came crashing down in a perilously musical, rainbow-coloured explosion of brass and crystal.
Feedback gulped and whispered, “Thanks …”
In the silence that followed, they heard the sound of laughter, high-pitched and echoing. Feedback blinked and looked up at the hole in the ceiling where the light fixture used to hang.
“So … not rats?” he asked.
Tweed shook her head and bent to examine one of the crystals.
Feedback knit his brow in an angry frown. “Wow. Maybe Cindy and Hazel did show after all! I mean, I knew those other babysitting girls were hard-core, but that’s a pretty lousy way to try and win a stupid contest. They coulda busted open my melon with a stunt like that!”
“Yeah …” Cheryl tugged her pigtails straight, a frown creasing the freckles on her nose. “That’s what I thought when the grand piano came crashing down the stairs at us, but …”
“I’m not so sure,” Tweed murmured, staring up into the hole in the ceiling.
“Oh, c’mon.” Feedback snorted, looking back and forth between the twins. “What—you guys think this place is, like, haunted or something? That there’s, like, what … supernatural creatures skulking around?”
Suddenly, the French doors flew wide open and the long white curtains billowed like
ghosts of departed opera divas making grand entrances. A frantic flapping outside in the twilight gloom sent Cheryl and Tweed scrambling for cover. Tweed dove behind the wingback chair while Cheryl dropped to all fours and scuttled under the desk, dragging an astonished Feedback with her.
“Das Wampyre!” Tweed whispered.
“Das what?” Feedback yelped.
“Shh!” Cheryl hissed.
A winged shadow swept into the room. Sure enough, it looked as if it was being cast by a giant bat right out of an old Dracula movie. The twins held their breath. Mummies bearing curses and possessed inanimate objects were one thing. Ghosts … well, that was something else. But honestly. Vampires? Real vampires? They were another thing entirely!
Cheryl tracked the shadow’s progress as it flowed across the wall … dipped awkwardly … and then did a kind of flailing loop-de-loop thing and dropped like a stone. A loud crash sounded from the other side of the room, over by the table and chairs, but she couldn’t see what had happened.
A clumsy Creature of the Night? she wondered. I suppose it’s possible …
“Well, that’s just spiffy,” Cheryl muttered under her breath.
Whatever the thing was, it certainly wasn’t graceful. Still, something had to be done. Not having anticipated any kind of scenario that included fangs, the twins had gone light on vamp prep when they’d packed their respective gear bags for the night at Hecklestone House. They were only equipped with a pair of emergency stakes (really, just a couple of broken school rulers) and a jumbo plastic shaker bottle of dried garlic flakes. Not nearly as effective on Creatures of the Night, perhaps, as whole fresh bulbs, but then Tweed had recently used chili powder to deflect a mummy attack. Anything that could potentially cause sneezing was a useful addition to a weapons inventory.
Tweed could hear Cheryl muttering and digging around in her bag and knew she was probably searching for their emergency stakes. If only Tweed could manage to prepare a garlic Nerf grenade in time, it might give Cheryl the chance to find the weapons and then they both might be able to get the heck out of there. Tweed fumbled in her bag as quietly as she could for kitchen spice and a sponge ball, and readied herself for attack. If she could draw the deadly attention of the fiend, she could give Cheryl the needed precious seconds to launch a secondary attack from behind.
The Haunting of Heck House Page 7