Slowly Cheryl raised her eyes …
“Gah!!” she exclaimed and fumbled with the speaker, dropping it into the white-gloved hands of the tall, slender gentleman wearing a natty tuxedo and a wacky grin standing right in front of her.
Even without his bejewelled mystic turban, it was, quite obviously, Simon Omar, World-famous Wizard of the West End!
“TA-DAA!” he exclaimed with a flourish, confirming it. “Look at me! I’m … I’m me again! I’m corporeal! Unexploded!”
Cheryl threw herself at him in a spontaneous hug, joined an instant later by Tweed.
“Yes, yes.” Simon patted them on their shoulders. “All right. You girls—and you lads—you really are magicians of the highest order!” He pushed them gently to arm’s length, smiling. “Now tell me. Where does one procure a mystic’s turban in this town?”
A babble of excited chatter erupted, but suddenly Tweed looked around. “Wait.” She frowned worriedly. “Where’s Shrimpcake?”
Before anyone could answer, a rain-bedraggled Artie suddenly burst through the door, gasping for breath.
“Artie!” Cheryl exclaimed.
“Where’ve you been, Art-Bart?” Pilot asked.
“I wound up over on the far side of the Drive-In,” Artie huffed. “Near the mini-golf range … huff … huff … so I cut through there and circled back around. My new shoes are gonna need a shine. But, best of all, look who I found!” He pointed overhead and a wobbly-looking, slightly singed gargoyle, carrying a golf club, flapped unsteadily in through the overhead hayloft door.
“Ramshackle!” Tweed cried.
“My putter!” Cheryl said. “It must have acted as a lodestone for Ramshackle the same way the tungsten projector thingamabob did for us!”
“Yup,” Artie said, grinning. “I found him perched on the Castle Putt-sylvania hole, along with the foam-rubber gargoyles. He likes it there and wants to know if he can stay.”
“Of course he can!” Tweed exclaimed. “It’s a properly Gothic home for him, after all.”
“Hey …” Pilot scratched at his nose, thinking. “Speaking of which … Mr. Omar … where are you going to live? I mean you—and the Hecks—you’ll all need a place to live now.”
“Of course they will,” Tweed said, her grey eyes lighting with a sudden flash of inspiration. “And there’s a perfectly good—perfectly empty—house not more than a few miles from here! On Eerie Lane!”
Cheryl knew instantly where Tweed was going with that and her blue eyes sparkled with excitement as she nodded in agreement. “More than enough room for a retired magician freshly arrived from abroad,” she said, grinning, “and his three adopted children, don’t you think?”
“W-what?!” Artie sputtered. “Didn’t we all just bust our backsides getting them out of that place?”
“Sure! But that was before they had backsides of their own!” Cheryl waved a hand at the erstwhile mystic and ex-departed Hecklestone kids. “I mean, corporeally speaking.”
“You girls make a good point,” Simon said, frowning thoughtfully. “Now that we’re no longer spectres, I think we’d prove more than a match for the Hecklestone House.”
Pilot was grinning. “You’ll have to come up with a cover story—Wiggins doesn’t get a whole lotta newcomers—but it could work …”
“Of course it could! I am a performer. A magician. I’m an expert at making my audience believe what I tell them.” Simon turned to Daphne, Roddy and Eddy. “That is, if that’s all right with you three?”
“Oh, it is!” Daphne exclaimed.
“I say!” Roddy nodded. “Capital idea!”
“I’d like that,” Edwina said with a serious look on her small face. “When we left, I think the house was very sad to see us go. Maybe it’s not that naughty after all. Maybe it was just afraid to be left alone.”
Cheryl remembered the forlorn cry she’d heard as they’d tumbled through the mirror portal and thought that Edwina might be right about that.
“And anyway,” the little ex-ghost continued, “it would be awfully nice to sleep in my own bed again— instead of just hovering over it …”
“All right, then!” Simon clapped his gloved hands together and gathered the kids, shooing them toward the barn door like a mother hen with chicks. “It’s settled. Now, you’ll have to promise to behave yourselves …”
“Let’s not be hasty, sir!” Roderick protested.
“First things first,” Daphne said as she went. “I think a few renovations might be in order. Like, say, a new front doorknob!”
“Sure!” Cheryl called out. “And maybe a few choice movie posters in your bedroom to go with all those old photos!”
“And I’ll swing by tomorrow to give you a hand repairing the hole I put in the roof!” Pilot said, grinning.
“And we’ll come get our bikes,” Tweed said. “And maybe give that hedge a trim.”
Cheryl nodded, smiling, and refrained from mentioning the potential presence of hedge spiders.
The gaggle of ex-spectres said their goodbyes and their thank-yous, waving as they walked off into the night, leaving behind a slightly dazed, exhausted, giddy-with-success quintet of kids surrounded by the warmth and familiarity and blissful non-hauntedness of the big old barn.
“I think I’m gonna go home now,” Feedback said finally. “Maybe spend some time cleaning my room. Play some video games. Re-evaluate my previously held world view. Y’know … stuff like that.”
“Karl?” Cheryl stopped him. “You won’t … tell anyone about all this, right?”
Feedback laughed a little wildly. “Who on earth would believe me?” he asked. “They’d think I was as nutty as you two!”
The girls exchanged a wry glance.
“Hey,” he said. “You guys can be as nutty as you want. Wiggins folk might think it’s weird, but I think it’s pretty darn cool. Thanks for the real-life adventure!”
“I’d better get going, too,” Artie said, putting out an arm for Ramshackle to perch on. “My mom’s starting to think I’m a vampire in real life with all these late nights.”
“Wait until she sees you in those duds!” Pilot said. “That’ll confirm the suspicion. C’mon, Karl. We can all walk home together.”
Cheryl and Tweed walked them all to the door and peeked out.
“Credits are rolling.” Cheryl nodded at the screen. “How apropos.”
Tweed grinned wearily. “I guess we should go back to the farmhouse and tell Pops the sleepover was a bust.”
“And give him a nice big hug!” Cheryl agreed. “And do extra chores this week.”
“Lots of ’em,” Tweed said.
“Yeah,” Pilot agreed. “You should. That was a dumb thing you two did.” He held up a hand to forestall outbursts. “An awesome dumb thing. You guys just gave those kids and that exploded magician a chance at being a family.”
Cheryl blushed and shrugged. “Aw, never mind. We couldn’t have done it without you guys.”
“Of course not!” Artie said. “Together we’re the League of Awesome!”
“And the stars of our very own movie!” Tweed said, thrusting her hand out in a fist. The others gathered around and did the same, knuckles touching, arms splayed in a circle like the spokes of a film reel.
Cheryl grinned. “Camera’s rolling …”
Tweed grinned back. “Aaaaand …”
Pilot sighed indulgently, expecting another ACTION!! sequence.
Artie saved him with a cry of “BEDTIME!!” and ran off into the night.
Cheryl and Tweed watched him go. Then they turned to each other, and as the screen faded to black and the cars in the Drive-In lot revved up their engines, they gave each other one last C+T Secret Signal (patent pending) before they shuffled off toward the little white farmhouse, past the Starlight Paradise double screens, glad to already be in the place that they called home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
*CUE ’80s MONTAGE THANK-YOU SOUNDTRACK!*
Aaaaand … ACTION!!
We are thrilled to once again have the opportunity to thank all of the wonderful, talented, hard-working people who have made it possible for us to tell tales of the Wiggins Weird!
Steven Burley, storyboard artist extraordinaire, who continues to amaze and delight and befuddle and confound and make us slightly barfy from laughing so hard. We can’t thank him enough!
Huge thanks to our extraordinary agents, Jessica Regel and Tara Hart, charter members of the League of Awesome—along with the fantastic folks at Puffin, Penguin Canada, especially Lynne Missen, our amazing editor; Sandra Tooze, our production editor; Catherine Dorton, our copy editor; and Vikki Vansickle, publicist extraordinaire—you guys really are superheroes! Your LoA rings are in the mail!
Thank you, as always, to Jean Naggar and the staff of JVNLA. And to the fine folks at Foundry Literary.
Thanks to our families, especially—as always—our moms. We salute you with the L+J Secret Signal (patent pending)!
But our biggest thanks goes out to all our honorary Wigginsians—you guys!—for helping to make the first book a success! We hope you enjoy the continuing adventures of Cheryl and Tweed and Company!
W-O-W!!
PUFFIN
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First published 2014
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Lesley Livingston and Jonathan Llyr, 2014
Illustrations copyright © Steven Burley, 2014
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Livingston, Lesley, author
The haunting of Heck House / Lesley Livingston and Jonathan
Llyr ; storyboard illustration by Steven Burley.
(The Wiggins weird ; book 2)
Ages 8 and up.
ISBN 978-0-14-318426-3 (pbk.)
I. Llyr, Jonathan, author II. Burley, Steven, illustator III. Title.
PS8623.I925H39 2014 jC813’.6 C2014-904436-4
eBook ISBN 978-0-14-319319-7
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The Haunting of Heck House Page 16