The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House

by Mary Chase

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  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Text copyright © 1968 by Mary Chase

  Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Peter Sís

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  ISBN 9780440419563

  eBook ISBN 9781101934968

  Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers

  v4.1

  a

  FOR SHEILA CHASE

  —M.C.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Old Messerman Place

  The Face in the Water

  The Ladies in the Pictures

  The Strange Lady on the Front Porch

  The Horse-Drawn Carriage

  How to Get Home Again

  The Seven Slinky Sisters

  About the Author

  THE OLD MESSERMAN PLACE

  Maureen Swanson was known among the other children in her neighborhood as a hard slapper, a shouter, a loud laugher, a liar, a trickster, and a stay-after-schooler.

  Whenever they saw her coming they cried out, “Here comes Old Stinky,” and ran away.

  Sometimes she would pretend she hadn’t seen them. She was a good pretender. If she was pretending she was a queen or a movie star or Maureen Messerman, she would not notice. At other times she would chase them, slap the one she caught, then run and hide until the trouble died down.

  Her mother often said to her father, “How I wish Maureen could be a little lady: sweet, kind, and nice to everyone.”

  He frowned. “She better learn to mind first. She better stop hanging around that Old Messerman Place.”

  The Old Messerman Place, which took up half a city block, was walled in, boarded up, deserted. You couldn’t see inside because the brick walls were too high, and the spruce trees growing just inside the walls grew so tall and so close together that even when you threw your head back and looked up, all you could see were four chimneys like four legs on a giant’s table turned upside down.

  In the middle of the wall that faced the boulevard hung a pair of high, wide iron gates across a bricked driveway where once carriages pulled by horses had gone rolling into the grounds. You couldn’t see where they had rolled or where they had stopped because just inside the gates tall wooden boards were nailed together and a sign read: Private Property. Keep Out. Trespassers Prosecuted.

  Some people insisted the Old Messerman Place was haunted, that at night they often saw lights flickering through the trees and in the daytime they heard a tap-tapping kind of sound like someone pounding with a hammer in there. Occasionally the neighbors called the police, who came down the boulevard with sirens screaming, unlocked the gates, pried open the boards, and looked around.

  A row of pigeons, huddled close together on the roof, would watch with beady eyes as the officers tramped through the garden with flashlights, up and down the stairs, in and out of the rooms in the big empty mansion, never finding anything or anyone. For a few days after these visits the garden would be dark at night and silent in the daytime. Then the lights would flicker again and the tap-tapping sound was heard as before.

  Boys were always trying to climb over the high walls. One would stand on the shoulders of another and reach high up, straining and straining, only to jump down panting.

  “Can’t make her. She’s too high.”

  Maureen Swanson never tried to climb in by straining and reaching high. What she did was talk to herself as she stood by the gates, her fingers holding the iron posts.

  “I’m Maureen Messerman. That house is my house.”

  One day, two weeks after her ninth birthday, she came home late from school. She had been kept by the teacher to write twenty times on the blackboard: I must not start fights on the schoolground.

  She was in a bad humor as she picked up the hose lying on the lawn in the Swansons’ backyard, turned on the water full force, and sent the dry leaves scurrying across the grass, fastening them up against the side of the house. Then she waved the hose up and down and across the house itself, across the windows of the Moodys’ house next door, and then across Mrs. Moody’s clean laundry drying on three lines.

  Mrs. Moody ran out of her house. “Stop that,” she screamed. “Stop that—you brat.”

  “You brat,” Maureen shouted loudly, and then she waved the hose up and down and across Mrs. Moody herself.

  “I’ll fix you.” Mrs. Moody was running across the lawn. Maureen dropped the hose, ran out of the back gate and down the alley. She could hear doors slamming, voices raised, and her mother’s voice calling, wailing, “Maureen. Maureen, you come back here.”

  She ran up the street and was flying past the Old Messerman Place when her eyes lit on the boards behind the gates. One board hung open, nailed carelessly after the last visit of the police. She pushed against it and it fell back. She wriggled through the iron palings of the gate, got inside, pushed back the board, and stood against it listening as the feet ran by on the walk outside and the voice called, “Maureen! Maureen! Come back here.”

  She looked around. She was in a large garden, overgrown with high grass and weeds. The tall spruce trees grew close together on all sides like protecting, green-needled walls. Across the garden stood a house almost as big as the post office with many windows and balconies, and a wide stone porch with no roof, shaped like a stage and encircled by a low stone balustrade. Three broad steps led down into the garden.

  Bushes and grass were growing between the posts of this balustrade, between the bricks on the floor of the porch, and at the wide brown wooden door, as though everything in the garden was trying to grow its way up and into that house. There were no curtains at the windows. Maureen counted four little balconies of stone and iron on the house, four pairs of glass doors behind them. The two windows above each of the balconies looked like eyes watching her.

  She waded now, knee deep through the grass and weeds, t
o a little pool set in stone like a swimming pool, but it wasn’t. An iron boy with an iron fish in his hands looked at her with vacant iron eyes as he held the fish high above the pool, as though just about to throw it into the water below, which was covered with thick, slimy green moss. Paint was peeling off his arms. Maureen broke off a weed and poked at the moss in the water. She stopped as she heard a tap-tapping sound. A woodpecker, she decided. She smiled and looked for him in the spruce trees but the blue sky got in her eyes. White snowy clouds were moving lazily across the blue. They looked like one big snowman rolling after three little snowmen. She sat down in the grass and watched them happily. Then she lay down and looked up. Wasn’t it wonderful in here!

  She sat up quickly when she heard the tapping sound again. Listen! Yes, it was coming—not from the trees—but from there!

  A little house, a summerhouse, made of wooden strips, criss-crossed, stood away back at the other end of the garden. She waded through the grass, hitting at it with the long tough weed in her hand. The tap-tapping got louder. She peered through the open door of the summerhouse. The tapping stopped. The woodpecker had seen her. He was in the summerhouse.

  At first she couldn’t see anything. Then her eyes, getting used to the dim light, found an old porch swing, a broken lawn mower, a hose coiled in one corner, the rubber peeling off like a snake shedding its skin. Near that was a tall iron birdbath, cup side against the floor. In another corner, on a small pile of old rotting canvas, sat another garden ornament—a little old man with a long white beard and a tall cap, sitting cross-legged on the canvas, holding a shoe in one hand, a hammer in the other.

  She had seen garden figures like him many times, sitting beside flower beds or rock gardens. They were called something funny like “leppercons.” They usually wore green painted suits and tall green hats. This one was different, she decided, because his hat was brown and it wasn’t painted. It looked like it was knitted, like the kind of cap a schoolboy might lose on a winter afternoon. And he wasn’t wearing a green suit but something that looked like an old undershirt, and his pants could have been made of a piece of the canvas on which he was sitting. There was something else different about him, too. One cheek was puffed out like a squirrel with nuts or a child with the mumps on one side.

  The light now seemed to pour in brighter through the latticework strips of the summerhouse, but she could see no woodpecker. Turning to leave, she stopped still as she heard a sound like “pish.”

  She saw the little man spit a nail out of his mouth onto the canvas. Then he put down the hammer, picked up the nail, held it against the sole of the shoe, and pounded tap-tap-tap.

  She heard a small thin voice saying, “And who are you?”

  Her mouth fell open. He was real!

  —

  Now there are two kinds of people in the world, who behave in two different ways when something unexpected happens. Most people take a step backward. A few step forward with a clenched fist. Maureen was one of these. She stepped forward and shouted, “Who are you?”

  The little man now raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were bright blue in his brown, wrinkled face. His eyebrows were gray and bushy. He did not blink as he studied her closely.

  “Glory be—if it ain’t Maureen Messerman!”

  She didn’t know her mouth had fallen open. Had she said that out loud as she stood by the iron gates?

  “Close yer mouth,” he told her as he got to his feet. “Ye’ll catch flies.” When he stood up he was the size of a five-year-old child.

  “How do you know?” she asked him, so surprised.

  “I know lots of flies.”

  “How do you know about—oh, you know—what you just said just now?”

  “What did I say? Sure I say lots.”

  She was getting cross. She stepped closer to him and made her voice low. “That name—Maureen Messerman?”

  “Oh, that.” He sat down on the canvas cross-legged and picked up the shoe and the hammer. “A bird told me.”

  “A bird did not. What bird?”

  “Oh, a fair-sized bird, bigger than a sparrow, not as big as an owl.” There was a frown on his forehead as he lowered his voice. “Sure now you better be gettin’ out of here and not comin’ back again—ever.”

  Maureen didn’t get out. She came closer to him. “That bird. He’s a liar.”

  The little man shook his head. “Not he—she.”

  “Then she’s a liar.”

  To her surprise he nodded and the long gray beard made a swishing sound against the canvas.

  “And she’s no lady.” He pounded the nail deeper into the sole of the shoe. “You can’t fool me on a lady. I seen one once here in this garden—with her seven little daughters, sittin’ on a bench out there.”

  Maureen followed his eyes as they looked out into the garden near the little pool.

  “There’s no bench there now,” she told him.

  “There’s no lady neither and no seven little daughters.” The little man looked sad. He had forgotten her. He was looking at the spot where the bench had once been. His blue eyes now looked like seawater.

  “What did the lady do?”

  “If I was to tell you that, we’d be here all day. She lived in there,” and he nodded toward the house. “She was scrumptious.”

  “What’s scrumptious?”

  He took a long time about answering that one. He made out like he was dusting the sole of the shoe with the tip of his beard.

  She began again. “What’s scrump—”

  “It’s what she was.” He sighed.

  “You’re silly,” she told him. “You’re just crazy, silly.”

  He nodded again. “Maybe,” he agreed, “but not so silly that I think my name’s Maureen Messerman.”

  “Stop saying that,” she shouted. “Don’t you say that again. My name’s not Messerman. I only say that sometimes. That’s—pretend.”

  He wiggled his little brown forefinger back and forth at her. “Ah now, pretend—that’s tricky. Be careful. First the whisper. Then the big wind. What happens is…”

  He didn’t finish it. He heard something and he held one finger under one ear and listened.

  “Here they come,” he whispered to her. “The fun’s over now sure. Off with you if ye know what’s good for yez and don’t ever come back.”

  She heard a loud flapping of wings as a flock of gray pigeons flew over the tops of the spruce trees, across the garden, and came to rest on the roof of the house. Pigeons! Only pigeons!

  The little man was gone. Where? She ran around in back of the summerhouse. No one there. Only a carpet of brown pine needles. Had she dreamed him? No. Looking in the summerhouse again, she saw a smooth place on the canvas where he had been sitting. The shoe and the hammer lay to one side.

  “Hey,” she called out, “where are you?”

  Nobody answered. The pigeons on the roof were sitting huddled close together, looking at her with beady eyes.

  She walked around the garden and pushed back the needled branches of every tree, looking underneath. Where could he be? A little wind blew against the screen in front of the big brown door of the house. It hung by one hinge and whined in the wind. The house! He was in the house!

  She ran up the steps and held her hands on either side of her head as she put her nose against the glass of the window and peered inside.

  It was so big in there—and so dark. Dimly, she could see a great empty room with a high ceiling, a black marble fireplace with a tall mirror above it. The mirror was cracked, with zigzag cracks like a glass map. From the high ceiling, from a hole with broken plaster around it, a dusty chandelier hung by one wire, as though someone had tried to swing on it and pulled it loose.

  As she pushed on the front door, she heard a creak-creak sound and waited. Then she pushed harder and the door swung open. She was in a big dusty hall with a wide staircase before her, going up, up, up. The stairs stopped at a landing with a tall dusty window.

 
Maureen walked slowly into the room with the chandelier hanging by one wire. Everything was covered with dust. The wall was stained with water spots. In some places the plaster underneath was showing. The room looked like someone who has waited for years in all kinds of weather for someone else who never came.

  Where was the little man? She heard a noise and ran into the hall.

  What was that? It sounded like a rustle of something moving somewhere. He was upstairs, maybe. She slowly climbed the stairs, stopped at the broad landing, spit on one finger, rubbed a clean spot on the dusty glass, and looked down into the garden. There was the pool, the summerhouse, the tall trees, and the weeds—all quiet, dreaming. She couldn’t see the little man anywhere out there. She heard a rustle sound again, like somebody moving somewhere. It seemed to come from the hall at the top of the rest of the stairs, which turned here and climbed up higher.

  “Hey,” she called. Her voice sounded small and whispery. “You up there?”

  The sound of her own voice scared her and she almost turned to hurry back down when out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash of color—something red—no—yellow.

  She looked and saw standing there a lady with a long yellow dress, a fan held in one hand before her face. Maureen stared and the lady seemed to stare back at her. It was a picture. She ran up the stairs. Pictures all over—on both sides of a big wide hall—pictures of elegant ladies, all wearing beautiful long silk party gowns. Gosh!

  Maureen stopped by the first one in the yellow dress. One arm was behind her back and the white fan was held against her face just under her dark eyes. Her hair was black and her skin was so white. On a brass plate fastened into the frame at the bottom was the name: MAVIS.

  Maureen looked at it for a long time.

  “You’re too skinny,” she told her, and went to the next one. She was in green silk, striped with blue satin. Her hair was red. Two little curls hung from either side of her face.

  She held in one hand a white teacup with a gold rim. The brass plate beneath her said: CLEO. One arm was behind her back.