“Someone needs to stay and defend the mansion,” said Mirrorz. “The supernaturals can’t be left alone and defenseless.”
“But why does it have to be me?” I fumed. “There have been no attacks since the Trio. There isn’t even proof that whatever attacked them is still out there. Mom could just cast a spell.”
“That isn’t as strong a defense as having an actual witch,” said Mirrorz. “You’ll see. Your presence here is vital. Just you wait.”
“There you are,” said Lark, coming into the library with Pep right behind her.
“We heard the news,” said Pep.
A crack of thunder split the air.
“They’re leaving now,” said Lark.
The three of us headed back to the foyer, where we found Corey, Kip, Cam, Grant, Mom, Meg, Audrey, and Lizzie all dressed in black rain gear. I couldn’t believe they were all leaving; it was as if they had lost their collective mind.
Cookie had also come in, and when I turned around I was surprised to see that Mirrorz had followed us from the library.
“We’ll be back in no time with the warlocks,” said Lizzie. “Imagine, helping out real warlocks. It’s the most exciting!”
“Don’t worry about us. We’ll be here drinking,” Cookie waved lazily. She paused, then added, “Actually, maybe we’ll go into Shimmerfield and gather some supplies. Be a dear and spread the word that Uncle Taft is in charge of the mansion, won’t you?”
Mirrorz inclined his head.
“Are you sure leaving is wise?” I asked.
“No,” said Cookie, grabbing my arm and marching me away from the group. “Put a lid on those protests,” she said out of the side of her mouth.
“We can’t leave,” I told her.
“No, but Mirrorz is going to spread the word that we did,” she said in a hushed tone.
I’d never seen Cookie sound this serious before.
“This is no time for messing around,” I told her.
“I’m not messing around,” said Cookie. “This is serious.”
“You’ll forgive me if I’m surprised that you realize that,” I said.
“I never forgive,” said Cookie.
“I thought not,” I told her.
By this time, most of the family was walking out the door with Grant. I felt a pang when I saw him on his way looking so dashing, handsome, and determined.
Lizzie clung to one of his arms and simpered, “We just have to be brave.”
He gently freed himself, but he continued to smile down at her.
My stomach flipped.
“Let’s get a move on,” my mom said. She had put on black parachute pants, army boots, and a cape. Meg and Audrey were dressed in much the same way, while Lizzie was outfitted in her usual leather. The boys had also all dressed alike, in black.
“Hold the fort,” said Mom. “We’ll be back before you know it.”
Cookie gave her a crooked salute and my mom rolled her eyes.
“Be careful,” said Pep, sounding worried.
“We will be,” her mom assured her.
Corey pulled the front door open and a gust of wind and rain slammed into all of us. Shutting their eyes against the terrible weather, almost everyone I cared about, plus Grant, left the mansion. Cam brought up the rear and tried to close the door, but the wind was too strong. Grant had to turn around and help him pull it shut.
Once they were gone I stared at the puddle of water spreading across the floor.
“All right ladies,” said Cookie, her whole demeanor changing. “Let’s get to work.”
“Really?” Pep was incredulous.
“I bought you some time to figure out who was behind the attack. Everyone is out of the house, but they’ll be back, unfortunately. Let’s get cracking.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“First,” said Cookie, who seemed to have a complete plan in her head, “everyone split up. Pep, you look in the chest in the drawing room. Lark, I want you to look behind the third bookcase in the library. Jane, make for the second back pantry.”
“We aren’t gathering your wine for you,” I said.
“Why not?” my grandmother grumbled.
“Because like you said, time is of the essence,” I told her. “We have to find the Root of All Evil before the family gets back.”
“Don’t admit you’re related to them,” said Cookie.
“I don’t usually admit I’m related to you, either,” I said.
“Thatta girl,” said Cookie.
A crack of lightning lit up the dim foyer and we all paused.
“Have you ever seen lightning that close?” Pep whispered.
“Sure I have,” but even my grandmother sounded unsure. “Okay, we’ll forget the wine for now.”
“And do what?” Pep asked.
“Defend the mansion!” said Cookie grimly. “We have supplies to gather, and then we’ll head for the gift shop. Do it quietly.”
The four of us split up, and I was glad to see Rose come trotting up to walk with me. The whole place felt empty with most of the family having run off into the storm.
The ghosts, le-haunts, vampires, and skeletons were all hunkered down in their respective wings, preparing for the exciting evening ahead. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the big event was postponed; they’d find out soon enough when everyone else came home.
“How are you doing?” Steve asked as I passed him.
“I’ve been better.”
He nodded knowingly. “It’s been a bad business. At least the warlocks are coming. It’s very lucky we have such skilled help.”
“Very lucky,” I said, and kept moving so I wouldn’t have to tell him that the warlocks were delayed.
“Jealous he’s so impressed with the warlocks?” Rose asked as she trotted along next to me.
I ignored her.
I wrote a note to Down Below, notifying them of what might happen tonight, and slipped it into the mailbox next to the door.
Then I went to the armory, where I found Lark and Pep already at work. Most of the stuff in the armory wasn’t magical, but some of it was, and Cookie had the power to turn more of it magical if necessary.
“We have to set traps,” said Pep, picking up a box marked, “Top secret. Use only if completely necessary.”
Once we had gathered all the useful supplies we could find, we headed back to the foyer. Cookie was there before us, dragging a large cauldron.
“Where’d you find that?” Lark demanded. “That’s the fanciest cauldron I’ve ever seen!”
“Of course it is. My apartment has all the family’s most important possessions. If it didn’t, the riffraff could ruin it all. Just like in seventy-three. That might have been the pot,” said Cookie. She mimed smoking as the three of us went to help her move the cauldron.
“Meaning your family?” Pep asked.
“Yeah, them,” Cookie shook her head.
“What now?” I asked.
“Magical traps on all the windows,” said Cookie. “If anyone goes in or out, I intend to know about it.”
Under Cookie’s direction we prepared Haunted Bluff Mansion for battle.
“Phew, this is hard work,” said Cookie, wiping her brow. “When your mom gets back she’ll either be angry or furious.”
We all paused to look at the grandfather clock, realizing that the rest of the family and Grant had been gone for a long time already, given that they had expected to find the warlocks not far away from the mansion.
“Shouldn’t they be back by now?” I asked.
“Unless something went wrong,” said Lark.
“Has something gone wrong?” Pep whispered.
“It looks like it,” said Cookie.
We walked to the window to peer out at the driveway, but between the darkness and the driving rain we couldn’t see a thing.
“This place certainly looks haunted,” whispered Lark.
“That’s because it is,” said Cookie.
Just then, the
lights flickered.
“At least we have a generator,” I said. “Good thing, because it looks like the power is about to go out.”
When no one responded, I looked at my cousins. “We do have a generator, don’t we?”
Pep bit her lower lip and Cookie shook her head. “Something might have happened to the generator while you were away.”
“And you didn’t get it repaired?” I asked incredulously.
“It’s been on the list, but we’ve been very busy,” said Cookie irritably.
“With what?” I demanded. “Now the power’s about to go out and we’re about to be attacked. The family isn’t back yet and at this rate they aren’t going to make it back in time!”
“They have that really good-looking man with them. I’m sure they’ll be fine,” said Cookie.
Yeah, but what about us, is what I wondered. I just didn’t bother to say it.
We’d had one lamp on in the gift shop. Pep had tried to turn on others, but Cookie wouldn’t allow it.
Suddenly, the power flickered and a great crack of thunder boomed around us.
Inky night surrounded us.
Somewhere in the haunted house a wailing commenced.
“This is wrong. They should have been back by now,” I fretted. I glanced out the window, but I couldn’t see a thing. Pep had pulled out a flashlight when the lights went out, but Cookie had ordered her to put it away.
“We’re an authentic haunted house. We use candles here!” she hissed.
“That’s a great reason to hang out in the dark,” Pep sniped, clicking off the flashlight.
Cookie started rummaging around in one of the boxes she’d brought in and finally came up with something.
“Ah ha! Here are some of the old candles,” she said triumphantly.
She lit the first candle by striking a piece of wood against the stone floor.
Our looks of shock were illuminated in the flickering yellow glow.
“That was impressive,” Lark gasped.
“I knew you’d finally appreciate something I could do,” Cookie said with satisfaction.
“She used magic to actually start the fire,” Rose muttered.
“You tricked us,” I accused our grandmother.
“You fell for it,” she replied, and used the first candle to light three more until we each held a candle made of rainbow-colored wax.
The silence of the mansion was broken only by the pattering of the rain.
“What now?” Pep asked.
“We wait,” said Cookie.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a cookie.
“Did you hear that?” Pep whispered.
After a while, Cookie had made us extinguish all but one of the candles. We were now sitting behind the checkout counter in the near-dark gift shop, waiting. The single lit candle sat on the floor creating eerie shadows.
“No, I didn’t hear anything,” Lark responded. “You’re just jumpy.”
But then there was a sound of scraping, and this time all four of us heard it.
“The time is now! We fight for the mansion!” Cookie balled her small hand into a fist and started to stand up, but the hem of her dress caught on something and she nearly toppled over. Lark and I quickly reached out to steady her.
“Old ladies make excellent warriors,” Lark said dryly.
“Who are you calling old?” Cookie demanded.
Pep picked up the lit candle and stood to her full height, which made her barely as tall as Cookie.
The scraping was getting worse. “Come on, let’s go see what we can see,” Cookie whispered.
We made our way toward the foyer. The rain was still coming down in sheets, and I wondered if it was possible to drown when you were on a cliff.
Suddenly all my grandmother’s demands that we prepare felt like a very good idea. Overcome with urgency, I raced ahead of my cousins through the empty hallway and into the foyer.
But the foyer was anticlimactic; it looked exactly as it always had. The fireplace shed the only light, but it was enough to let us see the whole space clearly.
As we stood there in the quiet foyer, a commotion from above made me look up, only to see Uncle Taft, dressed in a full army uniform from the seventeen hundreds and wearing a sword at his side and a black eyepatch over his left eye.
He was standing on the first landing of the great staircase, waving at me frantically. “The time is fast approaching! The hour of reckoning is here! I fear that we’re too late!”
“What are you talking about?” I called up to him. With a sinking feeling I understood at last that not all his ranting was crazy. In the dark, in the storm, with the threat of violence hanging over us, I had to admit that maybe, just maybe, some of the stuff he’d been going on about for weeks was actually true.
“Prepare for the Root of All Evil!” he yelled. Then he dashed away.
“Should we go after him?” Pep asked.
“Can we catch him?” Lark scratched her head.
“He knows all the secrets of this place and he has a head start,” I said, still feeling the urge to dash up the stairs.
“You don’t have a chance,” said Cookie, stumping into the room.
“Is what he says true?” I asked.
“I’d have to have listened to what he said to be able to tell you,” she informed us.
“Very helpful,” I replied.
“So the noise was only Taft. Come on, we must get back to the gift shop. Do you want to give it all away?” Cookie demanded, as if the present excursion had been all our fault.
We followed her back to the shop anyhow.
“More waiting,” Pep sighed when we got there.
We had barely sat down when there was a scraping sound again, but it was different this time. Something had definitely been dragged across the floor.
“Do you think that one was Uncle Taft?” I asked my friends.
“We should check it out,” said Lark.
We headed back to the foyer.
“At this rate you aren’t going to be hidden for long,” Cookie complained. “I went to all kinds of trouble to make the Root of All Evil think we’d left the property, and now here you are parading around as if it’s some kind of holiday.”
“Do you want us to investigate the noise or not?” I replied.
We came into the foyer and stopped short. There was still a scraping noise, but what really bowled us over was that this time the grandfather clock was missing.
Uncle Taft had definitely not run off with it.
I looked around wildly, then cried, pointing upward, “There it is!”
Dangling near the ceiling in the middle of the foyer was the grandfather clock. The ancient, massive antique was tilted on its side and spinning slowly in the air.
Surrounding it were two ghosts, who, at the sound of my voice, looked down and glared.
“It’s too late,” one of them called gleefully.
“The Root of All Evil has won,” the other yelled.
“Let’s go!” Lark yelled, dashing for the stairs.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Cookie shouted as we three cousins dashed off.
As I reached the second landing I turned around to look at my grandmother. She saw me staring and yelled, “Go! I’m the only witch here who can take care of herself alone.”
With that she extinguished the candle she’d been holding and the foyer went dark. Knowing there was no going back, I turned around and kept running after Lark and Pep.
After a few seconds I heard a scuffling behind us and turned to look. At first I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, then the fireplace flickered just right and I made out a vampire coming toward us. Two more appeared on either side of us.
“Pep! Lark!” I cried. My cousins were far in front of me, but they were losing ground to the ghosts who were making off with Mom’s prized clock.
The next instant three skeletons jumped out from a side door and cut me off.
For a spli
t second Lark and Pep looked back at me, hesitating, but I waved them on. The clock was the most important thing.
The skeletons came toward me. The ghosts above me disappeared over the balcony.
I stumbled through the nearest door my hands could find.
“Where did she go?” I heard one of the ghosts demand.
“I have no idea. Did you see her? Did you see her?”
The ghosts were right outside the door where I was hiding. They could see better than I could, especially because they glowed, but apparently they hadn’t been watching closely enough to track me. My breathing was so loud I was afraid they’d hear me, so I tried to calm down.
I moved away from the door as silently as I could, knowing I was now all alone in the haunted house.
The house had never look so good. We sure had been ready for the big event tonight. Too bad real life had intervened.
Without realizing it when I grabbed the nearest door, I had entered The Room of No Return, which surely felt like poetic justice. A pinkish glow emanated from the overhead lights, fake blood was splattered over the wall, and a creaking sound came from the chains hanging above me. I started moving quietly along.
The next room was even worse. The vampire coffins were lined up in neat rows. Some were open, and those had plush red interiors.
There were no vampires, probably because they had scattered around the mansion looking for me.
I gulped. I didn’t know whom to trust anymore.
It suddenly hit me that all the supernaturals on the property could be in on the plot; the entire field of Down Below could be part of the Root of All Evil. The basement of the mansion had always felt like another world, as in, I didn’t care about them so they didn’t care about me. But what if they did care? What if this whole time they had been plotting to take over the mansion from my family?
I swallowed hard. If we were to get attacked from all sides, I didn’t think we stood a chance.
My cousins had kept chasing after the grandfather clock, and now I had no way of knowing where they were. My insides were twisted with worry for them.
Of all the family, only we four witches had been left at the mansion when everyone else had been drawn away to rescue the warlocks, and the (I now realized) totally predictable result was that we’d been attacked and separated.
Spooky Business (Jane Garbo Mysteries Book 1) Page 20