by R. L. Stine
I laughed. “Laura, it’s still daytime,” I said.
I crossed the room to Jesse and Harmony to see if I could settle the Frisbee war. Sabrina carried some tissues over to Howard, who was screaming that he had to blow his nose.
“Where is Mrs. Lange?” I asked.
“She had a problem at one of the restaurants,” Laura replied. “She left me in charge.” She blew a strand of hair off her forehead. “But then things got out of control.”
Laura is twelve, our age. She is short and thin and has very pale white skin, silvery gray eyes, and long tangles of white-blond hair that she’s constantly pushing back or untangling or twisting around her fingers.
Today she wore a short denim skirt over black leggings. And a red-and-white TUMBLEDOWN FARMS sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows.
Laura doesn’t go to our school. She goes to a private school. I think she lives close to the farm. She helps Mrs. Lange with the after-school program and a lot of other chores.
She’s kind of hard to get to know. I think she’s very shy.
I took the Frisbee from Jesse and Harmony and swung it behind my back. “No Frisbee in the house,” I said. “Let’s do something else, okay?”
Harmony spun away to join Angela at the art table. Jesse took a step back.
Suddenly, his eyes went wide and his mouth twisted in horror. He pointed up at me. “Your face!” he cried. “Carly Beth — your face! Why is it so ugly?”
I let out a gasp. What was he staring at?
The mask?
How could that be?
I staggered back. I raised my hands to my cheeks.
Jesse burst out laughing. “Gotcha!” he said. He gave me a hard shove. “Gotcha, Carly Beth.” He did a crazy dance around the room, laughing like a wild man.
I felt like a total jerk. How stressed was I? I let a five-year-old frighten me.
Get a grip, Carly Beth!
Mrs. Lange came trotting in. She never walks. She runs. She’s a tall, heavy woman and looks older than my parents, with bright orange hair, rosy cheeks, and green eyes. She wears baggy plaid flannel shirts, long skirts down to the floor, and cowboy boots.
She is a total energy machine. I’ve never seen her sit down! And she talks as fast as she moves.
“What are y’all doing indoors on such a beautiful day?” she boomed. She gathered up empty drink cups. “Get outside. Smell that fresh farm air.”
She picked something out of Colin’s hair. She patted Angela’s cheek. “I know what. Go pick apples. They’re fallin’ off the trees. Get the buckets behind the house. Fill ’em up, hear? Go on — get!” She practically shooed us out.
Sabrina followed me out the door. “This is a good idea,” she said. “Let them blow off some steam.”
Well, that’s exactly what they did. The kids went tearing across the pasture, shouting and pushing one another and dancing and screaming. Sabrina and I grabbed buckets and ran after them.
“Hey — stick together!” I shouted. I followed them into the thick tangle of apple trees. “Stick together! Don’t get lost!”
The air grew cooler as we moved under the shade of the trees. And the ground, thick with leaves, grew soft and squishy.
“Jesse — don’t throw apples!” Sabrina shouted. “Hey — stop!”
“No throwing!” I yelled. “You could hurt somebody. Hey!”
Angela came running to me, crying and rubbing her head. “Jesse hit me!”
I hugged her and gave her head a kiss. “All better.”
“Oh, yuck!” Howard was making faces, bending over something in the leaves. Other kids hurried to join him. “Oh, yuck. That’s sick!”
I hurried over to them. Jesse was poking something with a stick. I peered down. A rotted apple bulging with purple worms.
“Barf!” Howard groaned. “Think I’m gonna barf.” He held his hand over his mouth.
I took him gently by the shoulders and moved him away. “Just don’t look at it,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”
Sabrina and I shooed everyone away from there. They took off again, shouting and spinning through the trees.
I held up two buckets in front of me. “Hey — doesn’t anyone want to pick apples?”
“We came here to pick apples!” Sabrina shouted. “Hey — anyone?”
An apple sailed past my head. Several kids laughed.
“Stop it, Howard!” I heard Harmony shout. “That’s so not funny!”
I couldn’t see her. She stood behind the trunk of an apple tree. I could hear the crackle of leaves all around as kids ran in every direction.
“Ever get that helpless feeling?” Sabrina asked me.
I laughed. “You were right. They are beasts. At least today.”
We followed the kids through the trees to the far side of the orchard. Some of them were jumping over a low wooden fence that had fallen over. A field of tall grass and weeds stretched beyond the fence.
And in a corner of the field …
I squinted into the late afternoon sun, a red ball just above the trees.
“What is that?” I asked Sabrina, who stepped up beside me. “It looks like a long house or shed. But what would a house be doing way back here?”
“It’s a stable,” Sabrina said. She shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand. “It’s been abandoned for years. It’s falling down.”
Yes. The windows were all broken. One wall had fallen in. Part of the shingled roof had collapsed.
I turned and saw Howard and Jesse darting across the field, pulling Harmony with them. They were heading for the empty stable.
“Come back!” Sabrina shouted. “Hey — you guys! Come back!”
They giggled and kept running. Several other kids began to follow them.
I cupped my hands around my mouth to shout to them. But I stopped when I heard the sound.
I listened hard. Was that a horse whinny?
From the abandoned stable?
Impossible, I told myself. But there — I heard it again.
I poked Sabrina in the side. “Did you hear that?”
She frowned at me. “Hear what?”
“I thought I heard something. A horse maybe. Let’s go check out the old stable,” I said. I started pushing through the tall grass.
“No. Wait.” Sabrina grabbed my arm and held me back. “Carly Beth, I know you love horses. But the stable looks dangerous. It’s falling down. We should stop the kids. We have to get them back to Mrs. Lange.”
“Come on. We’ll just take a quick peek,” I said.
I grabbed Sabrina’s hand and started to drag her through the field. We didn’t get far.
After five or six steps, we both heard a frightened voice yell from behind us:
“NOOOOOOOO! DON’T GO THERE!”
I spun around. Laura stood behind us at the edge of the apple orchard. Her blond hair blew wildly around her face. She waved frantically, shouting for us to come back.
So Sabrina and I rounded up the kids. They were pretty easy to herd back. The long walk and all the running and screaming had them tired out.
Their parents and babysitters were waiting in the front room to take them home. Sabrina, Laura, and I stuffed them into their coats and hats, and they were gone.
Silence.
The only sounds now were the rattle of the old windows against the wind and the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the front hallway.
The three of us cleaned up the playroom. Then we headed to the kitchen. It was an enormous old farmhouse kitchen with a wide window along the back of the house, looking out on the pasture.
Laura had a pot of hot chocolate on the stove. She poured it into tall white mugs. We sat down to sip it and relax at the kitchen table with its red-and-white-checkered tablecloth.
“So, what’s the deal with the abandoned stable?” I asked. “Why did you yell like that?”
Laura slowly twirled her mug between her pale hands. “Don’t you know about that old stable?�
� she asked us in a hushed voice.
A hard gust of wind rattled the kitchen window.
Sabrina and I shook our heads. “We never walked there before,” I said.
Laura nodded. She took a sip of hot chocolate. “It’s a scary story,” she said. “Mrs. Lange told me the whole thing. It’s actually very sad.”
I leaned forward. “A scary story? What do you mean?”
Laura curled a strand of hair between her fingers. She kept her eyes on the window. “It was a riding stable many years ago,” she started. “Very popular. With beautiful horses. Well cared for and well groomed.”
She took another sip from her mug and held it between her hands. “One night, people in the farmhouse heard screams. High-pitched shrieks and screams. Not human screams. They knew they couldn’t be human screams.”
I suddenly had a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What do you mean? Who was screaming?” I asked.
“The screams were shrill and frightened,” Laura continued. “They came from the stable. The horses were screaming.” She twisted and untwisted her hair. “I’ve never heard a horse scream. Have you?”
I swallowed. “It … it must have been terrifying. But —”
“Everyone went running to the stable. They pulled open the doors and found the horses dead,” Laura said. “All of them. Lying against the wall in a heap. All dead.”
“Huh?” I gasped. “Why? What killed them?”
“Panic,” Laura replied. “They all died from fear.”
Sabrina had her hands up to her cheeks. Her dark eyes were wide with horror. “But — why?” she asked.
Wind rattled the window again. I shivered.
I love horses. I wanted to work after school in the stable near my house. But they didn’t have a job for me. So I ended up at Tumbledown Farms.
“The stable boy was blamed,” Laura said. “He sneaked into the stable one night. They think he wanted to scare the horse groomer. Or maybe someone else in the stable.”
“But he scared the horses instead?” I asked.
Laura nodded. “You could hear them screeching and wailing for miles. They went insane. They were locked inside the stable. But they stampeded. They crushed each other against the door, against the stable walls. The stable boy fell under their hooves and was kicked to death.”
“Oh, wow,” I muttered.
I glanced across the table at Sabrina. She hadn’t taken a sip of her hot chocolate. She had her eyes down.
“That’s the story, according to Mrs. Lange,” Laura said. “I warned you it was sad. Can you imagine opening the stable door and finding the horses in a heap — dead?”
I swallowed hard. “But how exactly did he scare the horses?” I asked.
Laura let out a long breath. Her face was even paler than usual. “You’ll never believe it,” she said. “The farmers claimed it was all caused by a mask, a hideous Halloween mask.”
Laura shook her head. “But when they cleaned up the stable, the ugly mask was nowhere to be found. It totally disappeared.”
I heard a thud. I was so upset by Laura’s story, I didn’t even realize I’d knocked over my cocoa mug. The hot liquid ran down my jeans.
“Carly Beth, are you okay?”
I heard Sabrina, but I was too deep in thought to answer.
“Carly Beth? Are you okay? Carly Beth?”
Could she be talking about the same mask?
My heart pounded in my chest. I pictured the mask — so hideous with its wrinkled, warty green flesh, its crooked rows of jagged fangs.
I glanced up. Sabrina was mopping up the spilled hot chocolate. She put a hand on my shoulder. “Earth calling Carly Beth,” she whispered.
I blinked. And focused on Laura. “Did Mrs. Lange tell you anything else about the stable boy’s mask?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No. Just that there’s a legend about it. About how it always appears at Halloween time.”
That sent a chill down the back of my neck.
Laura narrowed her silvery gray eyes at me. “Why are you so interested, Carly Beth?”
“It … it’s just so sad,” I stammered.
“Know what’s weird?” Sabrina said. “Carly Beth said she heard a horse whinny. In that old stable.”
Laura squinted at me. “No way. That’s part of the story. That the ghosts of the horses remain in the stable.”
“She heard a horse,” Sabrina insisted. “Definitely a horse whinny. Right, Carly Beth?”
Before I could answer, Mrs. Lange came bursting in. Her arms were loaded down with firewood logs. She dumped them in front of the old potbellied stove at the back of the kitchen.
“Are y’all talking about our famous haunted stable?” she asked. She wiped her hands off on her long skirt. Then she grabbed a mug and emptied the hot chocolate pot into it.
“It’s fun to tell ghost stories at Halloween,” she said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. But you know what everyone says, don’t you? That the old stable is haunted — by those poor horses — and by the stable boy?”
We stared at her. “You mean, the stable boy’s ghost is still there?” I asked.
Mrs. Lange nodded. “They say he won’t leave until he gets his Halloween mask back.”
I couldn’t help myself. I let out a sharp cry.
Across the table, Laura stared at me. “What’s wrong, Carly Beth?” she asked.
Mrs. Lange laughed. “Maybe Carly Beth just doesn’t like ghost stories,” she said.
“Right,” I said. My face suddenly felt hot. “Scary stories always give me nightmares.”
I jumped up. “Come on, Sabrina. The bus will be here any minute.”
Sabrina and I hurried to put on our coats. As we walked down the gravel path to the road, I knew we were both asking ourselves the same questions:
Did the stable boy have the same mask all those years ago? The mask that’s in my basement? And was the boy’s ghost in the abandoned stable, waiting to get it back?
* * *
At dinner, I couldn’t stop thinking about Laura’s story. About the poor horses screaming their heads off. Stampeding into the wall and dying in a horrible panic.
About the mask … the ugly, terrifying mask.
“Carly Beth, are you awake?” Dad asked. “Didn’t you hear me asking about your job?”
“Uh … no. Sorry,” I muttered.
“Maybe she’s a zombie,” my little brother, Noah, said. “Let’s see …” He pinched my arm really hard.
“Hey!” I jerked my arm away. “Give me a break, Noah!”
Noah giggled and tried to pinch me again.
“Brat! You’re worse than the five-year-olds!” I said.
“You’re worse than the four-year-olds!” he said.
“Ooh. Clever!”
“Those kids must have run you ragged today,” Mom said. She reached over and smoothed back my hair.
“Yeah. They were pretty wild,” I muttered.
“You’re worse than the two-year-olds!” Noah said, and giggled some more.
“Can I be excused?” I asked.
I hurried up to my room. I had a lot of homework. But I couldn’t concentrate on it. I kept worrying about the Haunted Mask.
I thought about last night. How it pulled me down to the basement against my will. How it forced me to take it out of its hiding place. How it almost made me pull it down over my head.
How it screamed … screamed … screamed.
I was so totally freaked last night. Such a close call.
Did I leave the metal box open? Did I lock it away?
I couldn’t remember.
I paced back and forth in my room. Thinking hard. Thinking about the boy in the stable. The horses. The mask in the basement.
I realized I had no choice. I had to make sure the mask was safely tucked in its hiding place. I had to be sure the box was locked tight.
I crept out of my room and made my way down to the basement stairs. I could hear Mom and Dad in the de
n. They were shouting and cheering as guns fired and bombs exploded.
My parents recently discovered video games. Almost every night after dinner, they were in front of the widescreen TV, playing WarMaster II in high def.
Totally weird.
I gripped the handle to the basement door and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to go down there. The scream of the mask still echoed in my ears.
But I had to make sure I had locked it away.
I pulled open the door, clicked on the basement light, and started down the steep wooden stairs. Again, they creaked under my feet.
I made it halfway down. I could hear the loud hum of the furnace. And then, over that hum, I heard …
… a whisper?
I sucked in a deep breath. And listened.
Yes. A whispered voice, harsh and raspy:
“Carly Beth … Carly Beth … I’m here, Carly Beth!”
A scream burst from my throat. My legs started to buckle. I grabbed the banister to keep from falling.
The furnace hum turned into a roar in my ears. I struggled to hear the whispered voice.
Silence now.
Silence.
And then a high-pitched giggle.
I gasped. “Noah!”
He stepped into the light at the bottom of the stairs and did a crazy dance.
“Noah! That’s not funny!” I choked angrily. I ran down the rest of the stairs and wrapped my hands around his scrawny neck. “I could strangle you, you creep!”
He giggled some more and ducked out of my grasp.
“What are you doing down here?” I cried.
He grinned at me. “You’re always telling people how brave you are, Carly Beth. But I heard you scream.”
“Did not!” I shouted.
“Did too!”
“I just screamed to give you a thrill,” I said.
“Yeah. Right.” He rolled his eyes. Then he pushed me out of the way and darted up the stairs. “Bye, chicken!” He slammed the basement door behind him.
I stood there, gazing around the basement, waiting for my heart to stop racing.
Was Noah right? Am I brave now? Or am I just pretending?
No. Stop thinking about it, I told myself.
I wanted to be brave. I didn’t want to be the scaredy-cat Carly Beth from last year.