The House Where Nobody Lived

by Brad Strickland

  “You should have told—”

  David was shaking his head. “H-he suh-said w-we’d k-killed S-Skunky S-Stevenson.”

  “What?” Lewis asked, his voice an outraged squawk.

  “Everybody knew th-that h-he c-came from our p-place just before the wreck. The p-police t-told s-some people that M-Mr. S-Stevenson was s-saying we h-hexed him somehow, we t-trapped him by throwing away that b-box—”

  “That’s crazy,” said Lewis furiously. “And anyway, Skunky Stevenson isn’t even dead. He’s in a mental hospital in another town. And you didn’t cause it to happen. He stole something, and it drove him out of his mind. Anyway, he’s been sort of off the tracks for years and years. Mike didn’t have any right to hit you. Look, you ought to tell a teacher or—”

  David shook his head. “No. I w-won’t. D-don’t you either. Puh-promise me, L-Lewis.”

  Lewis got a little inkling of the frustration that Uncle Jonathan must have felt kneeling beside the fallen Mr. Stevenson that night when no one else would step forward and Mr. Stevenson couldn’t stop wailing. “You should,” he insisted.

  David gave him a pleading look. “I d-don’t want to c-cause trouble.”

  Lewis didn’t answer right away. “Look,” he said at last, “Rose Rita and I really like you. If anybody else picks on you or even looks at you funny, you tell me or Rose Rita, okay?”

  David pressed his lips into a straight line and gave a weak nod. His expression was troubled, but he didn’t want to talk, and Lewis couldn’t force him. At least, though, Lewis could find them a way back into the lunchroom where no one would pay them much attention. They had to sneak around the corner and into a hall door, but they managed it without bringing down the wrath of a teacher. Lewis had not even had time to eat, but he didn’t much feel like tackling the lunchroom food. His stomach churned and he still had that sick feeling whenever he thought about big Mike Dugan whaling away on David. Not that Lewis would have the nerve to tell off Mike. If he tried, he knew he would wind up with bruises and aches, just like David.

  That afternoon in science class, Lewis noticed how truly haggard David was looking. They were doing a chemistry lesson. The kids changed lab partners pretty much any way they wanted, and that day Lewis paired up with David, who usually was the odd student working alone at the last table.

  The bruises that David had tried to keep hidden showed up clearly in the harsh daylight that streamed through the tall school windows. His left eyelid had a nasty twitch, and his swollen lip looked painful.

  Today they were using litmus paper to test various liquids and sorting them as acids or bases. Everyone had ten little test tubes of solutions, some clear as water, others weak transparent colors, green, pale blue, and even a shade of purple that Lewis thought Mrs. Zimmermann would like. The test tubes were labeled A through J. Everyone had to write down the letters of the solutions on a lab-report form. Then they had to use two kinds of litmus paper, blue and pink. A blue strip turned pink in acid, and a pink one turned blue in a base. If neither changed, the liquid was neutral.

  It was pretty simple, and Lewis spent more time looking at David’s injured face than at the slips of litmus paper. David was trying to concentrate, but twice he made mistakes with the elementary experiment, once writing down that an acid solution was a base, once that a clear neutral solution that Lewis suspected to be plain old tap water was an acid.

  Lewis corrected him both times, and when they turned in their answer sheet, he was pretty sure they had scored a hundred. Mr. Beemuth, who was so bald that his head looked sanded and polished, glanced at the paper and nodded. “Good work, boys. You have an accident, Keller?” he asked in an uninterested voice.

  David’s face turned all red and he nodded miserably.

  “Well, be more careful. These are all correct.” He put a check mark on the lab sheet and wrote two grades down in his grade book, and that was that.

  Lewis nudged David. “All right, partner,” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “We aced that one, didn’t we?”

  At that moment, someone dropped a test tube, and it shattered on the floor. It was no big deal.

  Except that David flinched so hard at the sound that he looked as if he’d just been shot. Lewis felt a surge of sympathy. He knew what that kind of fear was like. And he wished he could somehow make it go away.

  But how? That was the question he couldn’t answer: How?

  CHAPTER 11

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE way, and that was to gain David’s trust again. As soon as school was over, Lewis found David, waiting to board the bus. “Hey,” he said, “I meant to ask you, how’s the house fixing-up coming along?”

  “Okay, I g-guess,” said David. “D-Dad s-says he s-still needs to take care of those p-pipes so they d-don’t freeze.”

  “Maybe we can come out and help,” suggested Lewis.

  “M-maybe,” David said as he climbed onto the bus steps.

  Lewis grimaced as the yellow bus clattered away. Like most of the town kids, he walked to and from school, and he joined up with Rose Rita as they made their way home. He told her about David, and as he expected, she glowered at the news.

  “Mike Dugan is nothing but a bully,” she said. “He should be—”

  “I know, I know,” replied Lewis wearily. “But who’s going to tell him off? He’d wipe the floor with me. And you’d embarrass David if you took up for him—everyone would say he was hiding behind a girl.”

  Rose Rita’s eyes flashed, but she reluctantly nodded. “Okay. So how are you going to help him?”

  “I can’t beat up the bullies, but maybe if David isn’t scared of ghosts, he could stand up for himself. I’m going to try to get Uncle Jonathan out there again.” Lewis kicked a fallen acorn, sending it spinning into the gutter. “I don’t even know why I’m trying to help David,” he confessed.

  “I do,” Rose Rita said. “It’s because you don’t like to see anybody picked on. And because you know what it’s like.”

  Lewis nodded and thought, It’s also because I hate being such a scaredy-cat myself.

  When Lewis got home and spoke to Uncle Jonathan, he nodded gravely. “The Kellers really moved into New Zebedee on a shoestring,” he said thoughtfully. “Those pipes are something that really shouldn’t wait, or they’ll find themselves with a sky-high plumbing bill when the pipes freeze and shatter. I have a teeny little suspicion, though, that Ernest may not be able to afford the insulation just yet. Let me see what I can do.”

  He made a couple of telephone calls, and he wound up by calling the Kellers. They had a party line, which meant they shared their telephone line with two other families. It took Uncle Jonathan a couple of tries to get through. When he finally did, Lewis heard him say, “Hello, Ernest? Jonathan Barnavelt here. . . . Very well, thank you. Listen, have you bought the insulation for your pipes yet? . . . No? Well, then I have some good news. You know, I just remembered that a few years ago I did a little insulating around this old place, and I looked down in the cellar a few minutes ago and saw that I have two full rolls of the stuff left. I don’t have any use at all for them, and if you want them, they’re yours for free. . . . No, no, I wouldn’t charge you a penny. They’re just taking up space in my cellar, and I’ll be glad to get rid of them. . . . Sure, I can bring them over this weekend, say Saturday morning. I’ll come dressed to work, and we’ll get everything shipshape in no time. Oh, is it all right if Lewis tags along to visit David? . . . Great, great. . . . You’re very welcome.”

  He hung up the phone and drummed his fingers. “Okay, let’s run over to that little hardware store in Crow Corners. Old Pete should have a few rolls of insulation I could buy without paying my eyeteeth. I’d get the stuff at Corrigan’s in town, but you know how people like to gossip about nothing. If I bought the insulation here, Mr. Keller would find out soon enough that I fibbed about having some left over, and that would hurt his pride. I don’t want him to think that I’m giving him charity. Some people are very sensitive about that
.”

  “Couldn’t you just lend him the insulation and let him pay you back later?”

  “I could,” agreed Uncle Jonathan, “but I won’t, for three reasons. First, it’s pretty inexpensive, and I can afford it with no trouble or fuss. Second, it’s just something I want to do to be neighborly. Most important, though, I’m curious about that house. I want to get out there again and make sure that Florence and I didn’t miss anything, and two rolls of insulation is a cheap price to pay for admission!”

  The next afternoon they got into the Muggins Simoon and took off in a pale blue cloud of exhaust smoke for Crow Corners, a farming village off on the Homer Road. It was barely a crossroads, with a filling station, general store, and grocery in one small building and a combination hardware and feed store diagonally across from that. Lewis had been in the place before, because old Pete, the toothless, grumbling man who owned it, stocked all sorts of old-fashioned, hard-to-get items that Uncle Jonathan occasionally needed or just wanted. If you wanted a buggy whip or a screech-owl call or a hand-cranked apple corer, you went to Pete’s, which was a tightly crammed, dark store that smelled of oily metal, seed corn, and kerosene.

  Sure enough, old Pete sold Uncle Jonathan two dusty rolls of insulation that had been stored on a ramshackle shelf in the back of the store so long that Uncle Jonathan’s story of having shoved them down cellar and forgotten about them was plausible. Uncle Jonathan heaved both rolls into the trunk and they blatted back to town.

  It was a dark, overcast day, and when they got home, Lewis went to the front hall to hang up his coat. The mirror on the coatrack at first looked very ordinary, but then a flash caught Lewis’s eye. He felt the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He told himself that an image in a mirror couldn’t hurt him and forced himself to look.

  He didn’t understand what he was seeing at first. It might have been a shield, black against a kind of reddish orange glow. Then the glow brightened, and with a gasp, Lewis realized he was looking at a woman’s face, exotic and strange, with a straight nose, a cruel mouth, and closed eyes.

  Slowly the eyes opened.

  They had no whites or pupils. They were red-hot coals, and flames licked out of the corners, curling away as they rose. The mouth opened, and more fire poured out.

  Lewis yelled hoarsely, and in a moment, Uncle Jonathan was at his side. “What happened?”

  Lewis pointed a shaking finger, but now the mirror was just a mirror again, and he was only pointing at his own terrified reflection.

  When he could talk, he blurted out what he had seen, stammering nearly as much as David. “Did you recognize the face?” asked his uncle.

  Lewis shook his head. “She said something, though. I couldn’t hear it, but I could sort of read her lips.”

  “What did she say?” asked Jonathan.

  Lewis swallowed at a lump that wouldn’t go away. “I think she said, ‘Death.’”

  Friday evening Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmermann came over for dinner. Mrs. Zimmermann baked a chicken and served it up with mixed vegetables and boiled potatoes, and as they ate, she grudgingly gave an account of her researches. “I’ve called, written, or wired every expert I know,” she said. “None of them can offer the least bit of help.”

  Rose Rita’s lips pursed in disappointment. Lewis knew that she considered Mrs. Zimmermann her best grown-up friend, and she was always very protective of Mrs. Zimmermann’s reputation as a great sorceress. “You’ll find it,” she said in an encouraging way.

  Mrs. Zimmermann smiled but waved off Rose Rita’s compliment. “Thank you, but someone with a doctorate in magical arts shouldn’t step up to the plate and let three fastballs zip by without even taking a swing, the way I have.”

  “Don’t you have some idea of what’s going on?” asked Lewis.

  With a wry shrug, Mrs. Zimmermann explained, “Well, I thought at first we might be facing a haunting. Ghostly apparitions can be very strange and sometimes very threatening, but since they aren’t magic, or at least not human-type magic, their presence is difficult to detect. However, all my so-called experts gave me some suggestions about how to test that theory, and none of the things they said to look out for have appeared in this case.”

  “If it isn’t magic and it isn’t ghosts, what could it be?” asked Rose Rita.

  Mrs. Zimmermann gave her a weary smile. “There you have put your finger firmly on the question.” She thoughtfully tapped her chin. “Well-l, let me see. It might be a manifestation of elemental spirits. Do you know what those are?”

  Lewis shook his head, feeling his chest tighten. Uncle Jonathan stirred, but thought better of answering. Sometimes he confessed to being a little shy when discussing magic with Mrs. Zimmermann, because she had studied the subject at a prestigious foreign university, while he himself simply had a bachelor’s degree in agriculture.

  Mrs. Zimmermann was ready to answer her own question, and she ticked off the possibilities on her fingers. “Some people, like the Rosicrucians, believe that the world is largely governed by spirits that aren’t really ghosts, because they’ve never had a body. These spirits can control earth, air, fire, and water.”

  Uncle Jonathan reached for a drumstick. “The old Greeks thought those were the four elements,” he explained, gesturing with the chicken leg. “That everything was made up of those four things, in different combinations. So the spirits that inhabit and control them are called elementals.”

  “But I have never seen an elemental, and neither has your uncle, Lewis,” put in Mrs. Zimmermann. “The fact that the pearl, or whatever the thing was, burst into flame made me think that a fire elemental might have stuck his ectoplasmic finger in this pie. But I’ve read up on that, and nothing else suggests any such thing. Dead end.”

  “Then there’s the idea of a Polynesian demon,” added Uncle Jonathan. “That’s a kind of spirit too. I’ve read up on them a little, at Florence’s suggestion. She thought about that after I described the woman’s face Lewis glimpsed in the hall mirror. There’s an old Hawaiian story about a man who offended the island gods, and they punished him by cremating him in red-hot lava. His body all burned away, leaving only his head, which burst into flame and went bobbing and floating along in the air. This fiery head then haunted the area where the man had lived, flying through the night and attacking the villagers. Finally, a wise man lured the head to chase him into a cave, where he’d created a trap of sharpened spears, and the head flew in so fast that it impaled itself—”

  “Stop!” pleaded Lewis, dropping his fork. Rose Rita was looking a little green around the gills too.

  “It’s only an old story,” said Uncle Jonathan. “But that didn’t pan out, either. There are no volcanoes around here, and Makalani certainly didn’t turn into a fiery ghost. She died peacefully in bed.”

  “Makalani?” asked Rose Rita.

  Mrs. Zimmermann was sipping from a cup of coffee. She nodded over the rim. “That’s right, we haven’t told you, have we? Princess Makalani was the name of Captain Abediah Chadwick’s island bride, and don’t think it was easy to dig that fact up from the old records.”

  “Even the local newspapers,” put in Uncle Jonathan. “Florence finally found the tale in a university library. A graduate student wrote a master’s thesis on local folklore back in 1926 that mentions the Hawaii House.”

  “Even that was fifty years after the event,” took up Mrs. Zimmermann. “Anyway, Chadwick was a secretive man, and no one in New Zebedee got to know his wife at all, except for the servants they kept. On the fateful night of January 19, 1876, the princess simply passed away as if she had gone to sleep and never woke up again. They found her lying in her bed, her black hair spread out over the pillow, with a little smile on her face and her hands crossed peacefully on her breast. Except for one person, everyone else in the house had died the same way, quietly in bed.”

  “The one person was Abediah Chadwick,” said Rose Rita. “You said he froze.”

  Lewis writhed, imagining how
horrible it would be to feel the blood freezing in his veins.

  Mrs. Zimmermann appeared almost as uncomfortable as he felt. “Yes, Abediah did die from the cold. In fact, people suspected foul play. Chadwick had fled up to that platform over the veranda and had barricaded himself outside. The temperature was about ten below that night, and they found him in his nightclothes, frozen solid, kneeling and leaning against the stuff he had piled against the door, as if he were trying to keep someone from bursting through.”

  Uncle Jonathan grunted. “I wish we knew someone who had first-hand experience of Hawaii. I don’t even know anyone in town who’s ever vacationed there!”

  “We’re sure not having any luck with books,” said Lewis. “I even looked up all the National Geographic articles about Hawaii, but they didn’t help.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann nodded slowly. “Well, let’s keep trying. Maybe we can think of someone to ask. Meanwhile, let’s have Jonathan go ahead with his visit to help save those rusty old pipes from Jack Frost. If we can get along without involving more people, I think we ought to.”

  Uncle Jonathan nodded his agreement. “I’d hate to put anyone else in town in danger. Let’s wait until I’ve been out to the house again before we begin pulling anyone else we know into this puzzle.”

  Later, as Lewis walked Rose Rita back home, she suddenly said, “I think my grampa visited Hawaii when he was in the navy. We could ask him!”

  Lewis stared at her. “My gosh, Rose Rita, you heard what Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan said! You don’t want to put your grampa Galway in danger, do you?”

  “No,” returned Rose Rita. “But he’s seen a thing or three, and he’s full of stories about odd places and events. Tell you what: If nothing breaks in the next few days, you and I will go over and talk with him. We won’t tell him the whole story, but we can see if he knows anything that might help us.”