Haunted Sleepover

by B. A. Frade

  “Head back in the direction we came from,” Bella said, pointing toward the reptiles’ room.

  I made sure Connor was with us. If this was a trick by his brothers, they’d honestly put a lot of thought into how to scare him. He probably wouldn’t sleep for a week. Then again, I had no idea how they’d done this. It seemed way too lifelike. But now wasn’t the time to figure it out. Now was the time to run, which we did.

  As we reached a display of frogs, I heard the distinct sound of glass shattering behind us.

  “The birds are loose,” Connor cried. “They’re going to attack us. We have to hide.”

  “They’re fake,” Emily shouted back at him. “Your brothers did this, remember?”

  Connor didn’t answer. It was going to be hard to convince him that his brothers were still behind all this. It didn’t feel like a movie or animatronics or computer holograms. It felt real. And pretty terrifying.

  I was going to grab the map from my bag to pick a safe spot to hide, when an eagle flew into the hall we were in. Its wings were outstretched as it soared over our heads. I’d never seen an eagle so close-up. Its talons were so big—and sharp! And the beak looked like it could tear us apart.

  “There’s a bathroom at the end of the hall,” Emily told us.

  “Everyone run for it!” Connor called as he bolted down the hall.

  I got to the bathroom second, with Emily right behind me. It was the girls’ bathroom, but that wasn’t a concern as we looked for a place to hide.

  “Hold the door shut,” Connor said, panicked. “Don’t let the birds in.”

  We stood against the door. Something slammed into the hard wood a few times, and then the hall outside fell silent.

  “Whew,” Connor said, slumping over a sink. “That was close.”

  “It wasn’t close,” Emily said, though I thought I could see fear in her eyes as well. “It was fake.” The more she said “fake,” the more I felt that she wasn’t sure.

  A chill swept up my spine as I realized something important.

  “Where’s Bella?” I asked the others.

  “I thought she was ahead of me,” Emily said. She called for Bella, then ran stall to stall, kicking in the doors. They were all empty.

  “We closed the bathroom door after Emily came inside,” I said.

  “I thought Bella was here before me. I swear I looked back and didn’t see her behind me,” Emily said.

  “I can’t remember if she was even with us in the amphibian room,” I admitted. My brain felt cloudy.

  Connor stared at us eyes wide. “Are you still thinking this is a prank?” he asked. “Because I’m thinking not.”

  There was only one way to find out what was really going on.

  I opened the Scaremaster’s journal and wrote:

  Where’s Bella?

  There was no answer.

  I wrote it again:

  Where’s Bella?

  This time, the Scaremaster wrote back right away. It said:

  I love grizzly bears, don’t you?

  Chapter Five

  Emily hurried outside the bathroom, shouting, “Bella! Bella! Where are you?”

  There was no reply. The halls were eerily quiet. No birds screeching, no rats scuttling, nothing. Not even an air-conditioning fan.

  Connor and I stood together by the bathroom. My heart was beating in my head. “Bella must be in on the joke,” I told him. I took a few deep breaths. This was insane. I did not believe that some possessed book had sucked up Bella.

  “This is probably what happened to Blake.” Connor breathed the name as if it were too scary to say out loud. “I bet the Scaremaster took him too.”

  “No way,” I said firmly. “That story isn’t true. This is a prank.” I was resolved to stay calm until we had evidence one way or the other.

  “Bella doesn’t even know my brothers,” Connor said. He shook his head. “I was going along with you until we got attacked and Bella vanished. Now I know the Scaremaster is to blame.”

  Emily rushed over to us, frantic. “We have to find Bella.” She was no longer saying everything was “fake.” She was concerned, but she was also focused. “Even if she’s hiding, we have to find her.” She turned on Connor. “Tell your brothers this is not funny. Not even a tiny bit.”

  Connor’s eyes were wide with fear. “I don’t think they’re doing this. Let’s go get Mr. Steinberg,” Connor said. “We need help.”

  “We don’t have time for detours.” Emily pointed at the Scaremaster’s journal in my hands. “He says we go to the bears, so let’s go.” She raised two crossed fingers. “Hopefully, that’s where she is.”

  And with that, we were off.

  I swear I was practically running down the hall. I was worried about Connor. I didn’t know if he’d pass out from fear, run back to the bathroom to hide, or go downstairs to find our teacher.

  Connor was like a jittery tour guide as we crossed through different rooms and exhibits on the way to the bears. “Are those butterflies moving?” he asked as we crossed through the hall and into the spiders’ room.

  I liked spiders, and this area hadn’t been on the scavenger hunt. Under normal circumstances, I’d have lingered, but Emily was yelling, “Hurry up!” and Connor was shouting, “They’re going to get me!”

  Finding Bella was way more important than seeing samples of the nine hundred different kinds of spiders in the museum.

  Maybe once we saw that Bella was safe, hanging out in a back room watching that sci-fi show with Chris and Cameron and whatever techy friend of theirs who’d set up this whole Scaremaster adventure, we could come back.

  North American mammals had a special hall on the far side of the insect displays.

  I never saw any of the butterfly or spider displays moving, but I’ll admit that when we passed a bighorn sheep diorama, I thought I saw one of the sheep tip its horns at me as I passed by.

  Impossible, I told myself. This whole Scaremaster thing was getting to me. There was no way that every display was moving. Even if Chris and Cameron spent weeks preparing for the fake bird attack, they couldn’t have also rigged every butterfly and spider and bighorn sheep display.

  We passed bison, moose, and jaguars before reaching the bears.

  Connor continued to report that every animal was moving, but I figured fear was making him see things.

  The grizzly bear on display was the same as the one on the cover of the book I’d bought. It was huge and brown and standing on its rear legs as if ready to attack. The book had taught me that the difference between the grizzly bear and a regular brown bear was the hump on its back. This bear had a mighty hump.

  The display was of the grizzly in tall grass. A sign nearby said the habitat was designed to look like Kodiak Island in Alaska.

  “Bella, come out now,” Emily called, her voice echoing in the narrow hallway. “Chris? Cameron? This isn’t funny anymore. Send her out.”

  There was no answer.

  Emily turned to me. “I’m starting to freak out a little.”

  “We’ll find Bella,” I assured her.

  “Where is Bella?” Emily said in a soft but firm voice, leaning slightly toward me, as if trying to communicate directly with the leather journal.

  I opened the book. The Scaremaster hadn’t written anything new. The last sentence told us to come to the bears. That was all.

  “Just like Blake,” Connor muttered under his breath. “It’s happening.”

  I needed Connor to relax. Emily was on the edge of losing her cool, and his talk about Blake wasn’t helping.

  “Calm down,” I said to both of them. “Bella’s probably hiding out around here, ready to jump out and scare us. Then we’ll all laugh.”

  “I like that idea,” Emily said. “I can’t wait to laugh.” Her hand was shaking when she pointed to the book. “Ask the Scaremaster.”

  I opened the journal.

  I wrote:

  We are at the bears.

  Where is Bella
?

  The Scaremaster replied right away:

  Who is Bella?

  “That is not funny.” Emily snatched the book out of my grasp.

  “Hey,” I protested, but she held out a hand to me, silently asking for the pencil. In that moment, Emily was scarier that anything we’d seen in the museum. I gave her the pencil.

  She wrote so fast that her usual neat handwriting was a mess.

  You told us to come here to find Bella,

  and we did. Now, where is she?

  Inside.

  “That’s it?” Emily asked, staring down at the page. “Inside what? Inside where?”

  I didn’t know. I repeated what I thought and had told her before. “Bella’s inside some back room, where she and Connor’s brothers are peeking out and laughing at us.”

  “No,” Connor said. His voice was soft, steady and light like a whisper. “That’s not it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, turning to him. “Do you know where Bella is?”

  His breath caught in his throat. I stared at him, standing there with his eyes open as far as they could open and his jaw slack. His skin looked like someone had covered him with chalk.

  “What is wrong with you?” I asked. When Connor didn’t answer right away, I followed his eyes to see what he saw in the grizzly bear exhibit.

  I saw the bear, but it looked just the same as when we’d entered. It wasn’t like the brothers had used their animatronics or holograms to make it move.

  Around the bear, the grass was still. Mountains with snowy caps were painted on the back wall. Inside the display were a stick and a rock and behind those… a boy.

  A boy?

  Yes. I was sure I was now seeing what Connor saw. By the side of the diorama, in the farthest corner, there stood a boy.

  I glanced at Emily. She was seeing him too. She reached out and took my hand in hers. I gave it a squeeze.

  The three of us stood side by side. The boy stepped forward and stared at us through the glass.

  “That’s not Bella,” I said, as if that might break the moment.

  The boy moved past the bear, straight up to the glass, and put his hands on the inside of the window. We could all see him clearly now. He was about our age. Shaggy dark hair and a few freckles. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a red baseball jersey with the number twelve on it. On his head was a matching baseball cap.

  The hat said “Wildcats” on it. That was the mascot of the middle school across town. We were the Trojans, and our biggest rivals were the Wildcats.

  “Is it possible?” I wondered out loud, peeling my hand away from Emily’s and stepping forward toward the glass.

  The boy in the display case at first looked as solid as the rest of us. But as I stared deeply at him, I could see a shimmer around his edges, as if his clothing and skin were blurry on the sides.

  “Is that a ghost?” Emily asked me.

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. I really didn’t know. Maybe we were looking at another hologram. I sure hoped so.

  It was Connor who dared to ask the question. “Who are you?” he shouted to the glass, though by his voice, I could tell he already knew the answer. He was just asking for confirmation.

  The boy moved his lips, but we couldn’t hear him.

  Emily moved to the glass. She banged her hand on the window.

  “Where is Bella?” she demanded, overemphasizing each syllable so the boy could hear her clearly.

  He had a sad, sorry look in his eyes as he glanced to the side of the display area, out of the frame to the left.

  We couldn’t see what he saw, but whatever it was, it made him step back, shaking his head. It seemed to me that he was trying to stop whatever would happen next.

  He shook his head again. Then he looked at us with an apologetic expression. Like, “Hey, I tried.…”

  I was trying to piece everything together, but my head was spinning. I had no clue what was real and what was my imagination. I couldn’t decide whether we were still being haunted by Connor’s brothers or by an actual ghost. Was the Scaremaster really pulling the strings of our night? I was trying to put together a puzzle that was missing large and important pieces.

  Suddenly, the bear in the case growled. Seriously. It was like when the birds started moving, only this time it was the bear. A huge, mean grizzly bear. The sound filled the display case and bounced off the walls in the hall where we were standing. The bear dropped from his hind legs to all fours and started to prowl forward.

  “What’s going on?” Emily cried. “Who’s that kid, and where is Bella?”

  The boy glanced quickly over his shoulder at the bear, then tipped his head repeatedly to the side, as if trying to tell us something.

  “There’s a door,” Connor said, showing us a brass handle that glimmered in the hall security lights. “He wants us to go through the door.”

  I was surprised that Connor had gotten all that from the head tipping, but sure enough, it seemed to be what the boy wanted.

  The bear was pacing behind the boy in the case. The boy didn’t seem scared, but rather irritated at all the growling and snapping of jaws. The bear’s grizzly fangs were dripping with saliva.

  A thought flitted into my mind: Could a bear attack a ghost?

  Wait. No. Why was I even wondering that? There were no real bears in the museum. No ghostly boys existed. Then again, that bear looked mad, and it was stalking along the glass window. I didn’t want to have another incident like we’d had with the birds.

  “He wants us to go through the door,” Connor repeated himself, a little louder this time.

  “Okay,” Emily said, deciding for us all. “That must be where Bella is, so come on.”

  I didn’t know what to think.

  It was Connor who convinced me. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Huh?” I turned to him. The bear was now slamming his paws against the glass window, and like before, small fractures were appearing in the glass.

  “It’s not my brothers playing a game. It’s the Scaremaster’s story and we’re in it,” he said, his voice serious. “I’m tired of being afraid. There’s only one thing to do. We have to find Bella and beat the Scaremaster with our bravery.”

  “Wow,” I said, impressed with Connor and willing to follow him into battle against his fears… and mine. But he was right. What choice did we have?

  “Let’s go,” I agreed.

  We were pleased to find the unmarked door was unlocked. Connor took the flashlight from me and was about to plow forward into a long dark hallway.

  “Hold on,” Emily said. “Connor, who is that ghost?”

  “It’s Blake Turner,” he said. “The boy who disappeared.”

  Chapter Six

  It felt a little like Connor and I had switched places. He was brave and ready to face the Scaremaster head-on. I was ready to throw the book into the bear diorama and let the grizzly rip it up.

  Science was no longer helping me. I was starting to face the fact that some supernatural things existed, things that two hours ago I’d have insisted were impossible. With every step farther and farther into the hidden areas of the museum, I was becoming more and more convinced that we were following the actual ghost of a kid who’d disappeared on his field trip. And with every step, I worried that Bella, or one of us, might be the museum’s next ghost.

  The hallways behind the exhibits were a perfect place to disappear. They were like a labyrinth. I felt sure there was a light switch somewhere, but we didn’t know where it was to turn it on. Our only light was the thin beam from Connor’s flashlight.

  Ghosts glow in movies usually, but in real life, they don’t.

  Connor shined the flashlight, alternating between the floor where we were stepping and the space ahead. He’d flicker the light to catch the back of Blake, who was moving fast ahead of us.

  The main corridor, where we were walking, branched off into smaller and even darker hallways every few feet.

  In my head, I imagined
the people who had installed the exhibits carrying materials, decorations, and wall plaques through these large, secretive passages. They’d create new dioramas and special exhibits. It made me feel better to think that the staff all arrived safely at their destinations. I mean, no one talked about museum staff disappearing. Who’d risk their life to work here? But then again, none of the employees were being guided in these hallways by a ghost boy and a possessed journal.

  I tucked the journal into the shopping bag and slipped it under my arm. Then, in the darkness of the passage, I reached out to take Emily’s hand on one side and Connor’s on the other. We needed to stick together.

  We moved slowly. Occasionally we’d lose sight of Blake, but then he’d stop and wait. His expression was impatient.

  “He wants us to hurry,” Emily told us. “We have to walk closer to him.”

  After several turns, we found ourselves in front of a wooden door carved with a detailed triangle design.

  “Can I have the flashlight?” I asked Connor, feeling the hairs on my arms stand straight up as goose bumps traveled down my skin. He gave me the light, and I shined it at the door. Then, with a sharp breath, I pulled the Scaremaster’s journal out of the bag.

  I held the book under the same light.

  “The triangle pattern is the same,” Emily said with a gasp. “What does that mean?!”

  “I guess we’re on the right track,” I replied, feeling a little hopeful.

  “Where’d Blake go?” Connor asked, looking away from the door.

  We looked around for him and realized that ghostly boy had vanished.

  “We’re going in,” Emily announced. “Blake must have gone through the door.”

  “Through?” I asked, even though we all knew we hadn’t seen this strange door open.

  “Through,” Connor echoed. He reached out to the knob. It was a tarnished, plain silver ball. “It’s unlocked,” he said, “just like the one by the bears.”