Tj and The Haunted House

by Hazel Hutchins

  “Hey,” said Seymour. “Neat!”

  “Neat what?” I asked.

  “They’re watching the ghost.”

  “No they’re not,” I said. “They’re watching the curtains or the sunlight or the dust motes or something.”

  “Maybe,” said Seymour. “Maybe not. Cats are sensitive to things — remember our report? Think about the way they warn people before an earthquake or find their way to places they’ve never been.”

  Seymour’s eyes crossed with the effort of remembering.

  “There was one story about a cat who jumped out of a living room chair every night after supper — just like it was being shooed out by its owner — except its owner had died months ago. And there were lots of stories about cats visiting gravesites on their own.”

  Our cat report had had all sorts of facts about cats, and some ideas that may not have been easily proven facts but were interesting just the same. At least I’d thought they were interesting until now.

  “No ghost,” I said.

  I picked up the kittens, one for each shoulder, and took them downstairs to show them their food dish.

  That evening, Dad and I watched the kittens. We watched them investigate the “secret cave” beneath the china cabinet. We watched them pounce on dust balls. We watched them chase their tails. Kittens are just learning about the world. They do all sorts of goofy things adult cats are too dignified to think of doing.

  Kittens also need someone to take care of them. Alaska took a great leap to a chair back, missed her hold and fell off backwards. I took my own great leap and caught her just before she landed in the fireplace.

  “Good job, TJ!” smiled Dad. “You’ve grown up a lot lately, and I don’t just mean the cats. Do you realize that last spring you didn’t even like the store and now you’re taking care of the pet section and coming up with good advertising ideas? I’m thinking you could be even more involved. You could learn about different sides to the business.”

  He was looking at me with that weird “proud father” look again, but I didn’t have time to think about it.

  “Sure,” I said automatically as I dove across the room just as T -Rex overturned the lamp.

  By bedtime, the kittens were exhausted. That was good because I was exhausted too. They slept on my chest and moved up and down, up and down, every time I breathed. They weren’t supposed to sleep on my chest, but what can you do when two little kittens start mewing because they miss their mother? They didn’t weigh very much and their purring was neat. Kittens have big purring even though they’re just little. I liked it.

  At least I liked it until three o’clock in the morning. At three o’clock in the morning T -Rex began licking my cheek — that rough little tongue again, and dinosaur hair in my nose. I set him back on my chest and lay there half-awake in the darkness. That’s when I heard it.

  Whoooooooooooooo. A hollow sound, a rushing sound.

  Whoooooooooo coming from down the hall.

  I craned my neck so I could see down the hall without leaving the safety of my bed. A glow was coming from the spare room.

  Whoooooooo.

  Don’t look! Don’t hear! Don’t move!

  That’s what I told myself. There’s nothing there. And even if there is something there, you don’t want to know about it.

  Whooooooooo.

  But I couldn’t just lie there. My heart was going wham, wham, wham. My nerves were buzzing. I had to do something. The way I figured it, staying in bed and not knowing was scarier than getting out of bed and finding out.

  I set Alaska and T -Rex beside me on the covers and climbed slowly out of bed. The house was dark and quiet. All except for the sound. All except for the glow.

  I crept down the hall. My heart was beating even faster. I got closer and closer to the spare room. I was at the cold spot now. A shiver went down my spine. I peered into the spare room. The window was glowing. Whooooooooo.

  “TJ?”

  I jumped about three feet in the air and spun around. In the half darkness I could just make out my mom peering around the corner. Her hair was wild and her eyes were skrinched up. Her voice sounded skrinched up too.

  “Sorry, TJ. Did I scare you?”

  Yes! Yes! Yes!

  “Ahhh … no,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” asked my mom. “Are you sick?”

  Ghosts! Monsters! Werewolves!

  “Ahhh … I’m fine,” I said. “I … I heard something.”

  “What sort of something?”

  I pointed towards the spare room.

  “That sort of something,” I said. “Whooooo.”

  Mom listened.

  “It’s the furnace,” she said. “The air duct in the spare room comes straight up from the furnace and it always sounds twice as noisy at night when the house is quiet. Go back to bed.”

  Even as she spoke, the furnace shut off. By coincidence, the glowing at the window stopped as well. As soon as it stopped I knew what it had been all along. It hadn’t been ghost-glow; it had been the motion light at the back of the house. All it took was a bit of wind moving the bushes to set it off.

  The backdoor light, the furnace — everything had a perfectly normal explanation. I should have been relieved, but instead I was still feeling spooked. Darkness does that to me. I headed back towards my bedroom.

  “TJ?”

  This time I managed not to jump.

  “How are the kittens?” called Mom softly. “Do they like their bed?”

  “Ahhh … sure,” I said.

  “That’s good,” said my mom. “It’s best if they learn to sleep in their own bed right from the start.”

  I went back to my bedroom. I put the kittens in the cat bed. I climbed under my covers, picked up the cat bed and put it on top of my chest, kittens and all.

  Prrrrrrrrrrr.

  Safe at last.

  Chapter 4

  “But are you really, really sure it was the furnace?” asked Seymour the next day.

  “I’m sure,” I told him. “And I wouldn’t have noticed it if you hadn’t been babbling about cold spots and ghosts. No more ghost stuff.”

  I didn’t tell him that after the furnace turned off I’d heard another sound — a whistling sound. It had also come from down the hall, but I didn’t get up to see what it was. I’d been wrong about it being scarier to stay in bed. It was way scarier getting out of it.

  “But Gran said there really was a ghost,” said Seymour. “It won’t go away just because you ignore it.”

  “Seymour!”

  “I think you should ask your gran for the whole story, that’s all. I mean, you don’t believe in ghosts, so what’s the harm in finding out the story?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  I thought about it through math. I thought about it through social studies.

  “TJ, you don’t need to be thinking about ghosts right now,” said Ms. K. “Right now you need to be thinking about explorers.”

  I had my books open — how did she know I was thinking ghosts instead of explorers? As Seymour and I always say, Ms. K. is a witch … not the nasty turn-kids-to-frogs kind, but the kind of witch that knows things.

  When final period rolled around, Ms. K. announced that the principal had agreed to our idea for a haunted house. Now we could go ahead.

  Gabe said his dad would donate some dry ice so we could have mystery fog wafting around the entrance. Amanda suggested that Roddy could do some of his magic tricks and Jen, who’s a real ham, could do scary stories with the old flashlight-under-the-chin trick. Other kids offered to help them out. Mia and her gang began planning decorations.

  “Leave a place where we can hang some old sheets along one wall,” said Amanda. “If we can figure out some way to hang them, we can hide behind the sheets and the walls can grab people as they go by.”

  Amanda really did have great ideas. Seymour was shifting back and forth in his seat, frowning harder and harder. I knew what was wrong. The haunted
house had been his idea in the first place, and Seymour figured he should have most of the good ideas. That’s the way Seymour thinks.

  “At least let me tell everyone there’s a real ghost,” said Seymour after class.

  I gave him my best keep it quiet look.

  “We don’t know there’s a real ghost. We haven’t heard Gran’s story,” I told him.

  “Then phone her and ask for her story,” said Seymour.

  “Seymour, I keep telling you. I don’t want my house to be haunted. I have to live in it. Don’t you understand at all?” I asked.

  “Know your enemy,” said Seymour. “That’s what you told me when you dragged me to the library to find books about Gran’s cats.” Suddenly he got that cross-eyed thinking look on his face again. “Hey, that’s a great idea. The library always puts out scary books for Halloween. Maybe I can get some ideas.”

  I wasn’t sure the school library had the kind of scary books Seymour wanted, and I didn’t want to watch him getting even more frustrated. I decided to head home. Amanda was going out the door at the same time.

  “Where’s Seymour?” she asked.

  “He’s looking for ghosts in the library,” I said.

  Right away, Amanda understood.

  “I took over his haunted house idea, didn’t I?” she said. “I didn’t mean to. I hope he thinks up some even better ideas just to top me.”

  She actually meant it. That’s the trouble with Amanda: she’s so nice you can’t even get really mad at her.

  “I didn’t think you’d be this inter ested in a haunted house,” I said.

  Amanda shrugged.

  “It’s something different to think about, something fun instead of something … “she sighed.

  Amanda doesn’t usually sigh. Amanda’s the kind of person who is happy most of the time, another reason it’s hard to dislike her. When she realized I was watching, she shrugged and brightened up.

  “What about the sheets?” she asked. “Is there a place in your house we could hang them? It really scares people when the walls grab them.”

  “Let me think a minute,” I said.

  I wasn’t really thinking about sheets; I was thinking about more important things.

  I didn’t want Seymour to feel that I was teaming up with Amanda. That would make him even madder, and he was already pretty upset.

  On the other hand, Seymour was right. I did need to ask Gran about her ghost story. In order to do that, however, I needed a little reassurance.

  “Do you want to come over now and check out my house?” I asked.

  Amanda looked surprised, but she nodded.

  “That would be great,” she said.

  Right away I felt better. With Seymour going ghost crazy, Amanda’s down-to-earth approach would help a lot. Amanda wanted to haunt the house, but she didn’t think there were real ghosts.

  “I’ll have to go home first,” she said, looking serious again. “I have to make a phone call.”

  “You can phone from my place,” I said.

  Amanda shook her head.

  “It’s better if I do it from home,” she said. “I’ll grab my bike. I can get to your place pretty fast if I take my bike.”

  The kittens were playing floor hockey with a milk bottle cap when she arrived — scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, thwack — across the wood floor of the entrance-way. With the excitement of someone arriving, they did a couple of kitten explosions. T -Rex leapt for the sofa and did crazy jumps like an overhyped kangaroo all along the top. Alaska ran halfway up the living room curtains and hung there. I didn’t know kittens could run straight up like that!

  We both laughed. I climbed on the footstool to lift down Alaska. Amanda began looking around the house.

  Our house isn’t huge, but it does have lots of nooks and crannies. I think that’s because it’s been added to over the years. There are high ceilings, wooden arches and old-fashioned windows. There are stairs going up to the second story. There is even a small set of stairs going down to the kitchen at the back, which would make it easy for people to go through the place on Halloween.

  “This is great, especially the way it’s open beneath the stairs,” said Amanda. “We can hang the sheets from the railing and they’ll fall right over this empty space. Kids can hide under here to do the grabbing and then they can knock on the steps when people climb up — double spooky. We can have cobwebs and neat stuff hanging from the high ceiling.”

  I showed her the upstairs.

  “Mom and Dad’s room is off limits, but we can use my room and we can do the eyeballs, worms and messy stuff in the bathroom.”

  Amanda had stopped in the middle of the hall by the spare room.

  “Hey — this is strange,” she said. “It feels cold here. Have you ever read any scary books? There’s always a cold spot that sends chills up and down the reader’s spine.”

  She turned and grinned at me.

  “It looks like your house really is haunted after all!”

  Wonderful.

  Chapter 5

  “I guess we should stop for today,” said Dad, glancing at his watch. “The time sure flew by.”

  It was Saturday morning at the store. Dad and I were standing by the machine that mixes paint. Dad was looking at me with that “proud father” look on his face again. I was doing my best to be the intelligent and worthy son, but that’s not how I was feeling. I was feeling confused.

  “You can leave after you finish your pet section,” said Dad. “You asked some good questions today, TJ. You’re turning into a real businessperson.”

  What questions? All I’d asked was why we put black pigment in the tin of white paint when in the end we wanted blue. I still didn’t know the answer. Dad had shown me the paint chart as explanation, but the chart only explained what to do, not why to do it. And hadn’t I heard that line about being a good businessperson before? What on earth was going on?

  “You’ll want to know these things one day,” said Dad. He winked at me and headed off to help some customers.

  I stared after him. For one brief flash, I thought I understood. Dad wanted me to take over the store one day.

  My heart jumped up to my throat. I looked around me. The whole store. I might be the person to run it one day.

  My heart crashed down to my toes. The whole store. I couldn’t possibly run it — I’m just a kid! And I didn’t even know if I wanted to run a store.

  Don’t think about it, I told myself. Don’t think about it. Adults are nuts. Adults are crazy, especially adults who run hardware stores. I had misunderstood something. It couldn’t possibly be what was going on. There had to be some other explanation. And whatever it was would be completely crazy, so I shouldn’t even try to figure it out.

  I headed straight over to the pet supplies and began unpacking cat food like mad. That was good because it got me thinking about the kittens.

  Alaska and T-Rex were still sleeping on my chest and waking me up with their rough little tongues, and I was still hearing noises in the house at night. Later today, when I was all alone in the house, I was going to lie on my bed with the kittens and listen to see if the house really did make the same noises in the day as it did at night.

  When I finished the cat food, I unpacked leashes for dogs and cuttlebones for budgie birds. Taking care of cats had made me interested in all sorts of animals, and I liked learning about what people need to take care of their pets. I filled up the shelves and wrote down things that needed ordering when the salesman came in on Thursday.

  One of the order forms listed a book called How to Train Your Cat I wondered if it had a section about kittens licking people in the middle of the night. I circled it to think about later, said a real quick good-bye to Mom and Dad and headed home.

  Seymour was waiting on the steps. So much for the house being quiet this afternoon. He lifted a lumpy bag from the step beside him and followed me inside.

  Mew, mew, mew.

  We could hear the kittens as soon as
we entered the house, but they weren’t anywhere in sight.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “They usually come to the door.”

  Mew, mew, mew.

  Noises are strange things, even in the daytime. Sometimes you think you know where a noise is coming from, but as soon as you head in that direction you realize you’re wrong. We looked behind the sofa, in the kitchen, under the stacks of paper on the dining room table and then behind the sofa again.

  Mew, mew, mew.

  They were sounding more and more pathetic. Where were they?

  “Found them!” called Seymour.

  He was in the laundry room, peering into our tall, plastic, laundry hamper. The lid had slid in sideways. Sitting at the bottom of the hamper, mewing and mewing, were T -Rex and Alaska. They were too little to jump out.

  “I bet the ghost dropped them in there,” said Seymour. “Ghosts like to play tricks.”

  I frowned at Seymour and reached down to lift them out.

  “No ghost,” I said. “They’ve been climbing on everything in sight, even though they’re not supposed to. They must have tipped the lid and slid inside with it. I found Alaska shut up in the cupboard under the sink this morning.”

  “That might have been the ghost too,” said Seymour.

  No ghost, I wanted to tell Seymour, no ghost. But hadn’t I been planning on listening to the house this afternoon, just in case?

  “Speaking of ghosts…” said Seymour.

  He fetched the bag from the front entry and set it on the kitchen table. Inside were library books. Some were from the school. Some were from the public library. Seymour was really determined this time.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” said Seymour. “The good news is — there are no such things as ghosts. It’s all swamp gas or people’s brains playing tricks on them or crooks taking advantage of people or magician’s tricks. Here are the books to prove it.”

  He set a stack of books on the table. I looked at two of the titles.

  Extra Sensory Deception

  The Myth of Supernatural Science

  “But here’s the bad news,” said Seymour. “Bad for you, that is — I think it’s neat.”