The Haunting of Heck House (15 page)

ATOM-TRANSPORTER SPARKLE is activated yet one last time ... revealing a white-gloved hand beneath a crisp cuff, embellished with an elegantly stylish cufflink. The LoA insignia ring is visible on one gloved finger as another gloved hand tugs the cuff straight beneath a stylish jacket sleeve.

CLOSE-UP SHOT of a debonair face, half-shrouded in shadows and wearing a black mask over his eyes. He WINKS at the camera.

CLOSE-UP SLO-MO SHOT OF MISTER MYSTERIOSO GETTING UNEXPECTEDLY SMACKED RIGHT IN THE KISSER BY A BIG OL' LEATHER-BOUND BOOK!!

“Artie!” Tweed yelped at the sight of him flat on his back, with his glasses knocked off and his nose buried— literally!—in a book.

“Shrimpcake!” Cheryl exclaimed. “Are you okay?!”

“Who did that?” came the pained, muffled reply. “Also …? Ow.”

“Hey!” Feedback exclaimed as the corner of an encyclopedia volume grazed his shoulder. Another one narrowly missed his head.

The French doors slammed shut and books flew through the air, banging against them with loud heavy thuds that didn't break the thick glass, but left behind splotches of ectoplasmic glop dripping down the panes. A heavy brass kaleidoscope launched itself off its oak stand and nearly took Cheryl's eye out! She shoved Simon back in the pack for safety and dropped to crouch on all fours.

“And Hecklestone thought he could control this stuff?!” she exclaimed, covering her head. Books and paperweights and decorative knick-knacks continued to zip perilously through the air, smashing into walls and windows in explosions of sticky ecto-glorp. “Sure! What could
possibly
go wrong?”

“Whoa!” Pilot exclaimed as a copy of
Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds
ricocheted off the fireplace mantel, exploding in a cloud of flapping pages. “A little light reading, guys?”

Ramshackle looped and dove above Artie's head, batting away a flurry of flying tomes as Artie scrambled
to find his glasses and staggered to his feet. The gargoyle's off-kilter manoeuvres actually seemed to help him avoid getting pummelled by the literature, and he was hissing angrily and meow-barking at the projectile-launching bookcases.

“We've
seriously
got to get out of here!” Tweed exclaimed, crab-crawling her way across the floor toward her cousin. “Before a rogue dictionary pulverizes one of us into alphabet soup!”

“Or we're smothered in ecto-goop!” Cheryl agreed.

“The door's still locked!” Feedback shouted as he kicked at it. “Jammed tight! What do we do?”

Cheryl and Tweed exchanged a glance. It seemed as if the ghost house had pretty specific ideas as to which way they should go. There was, after all, only
one
way out of that room that wasn't a door or a window or a locked-from-the-other-side secret staircase.

“An old stage magician's trick it is, then,” Tweed said grimly.

“We don't know what's down there!” Cheryl protested.

“No. But we know what's up here.”

The sounds of ectoplasm SPLAT-SIZZLE were almost louder now than the sounds of book and knick-knack impacts. Options were limited.

“All right, all right,” Cheryl muttered nervously. “Here's hoping for laundry chute over tiger pit …”

“Here's hoping!” Tweed agreed fervently. When
Cheryl hesitated, Tweed gripped her by the shoulder. “We can do this, partner. Just think of it as another challenge! After all, you're the Toxic Revenger, right? And I'm … I'm …”

Cheryl blinked at her, waiting.

“I'm Tarantu-lass!” Tweed said, finally.

Cheryl grinned fiercely. “You are?”

“I am!” Tweed said decisively. “And we're founding members of the League of Awesome!”

That was all it took. That moment of decisiveness. The girls exchanged the C+T Secret Signal (patent pending) and Cheryl spun around to see the boys on the other side of the room in various poses of crouch/huddle/flying-book-avoidance.

“Right! Okay, League!” Cheryl called. “Hit the dirt! Stay low! Don't stop! And follow us!”

Crawling on her elbows, Cheryl slithered across the floor like a snake in a shooting gallery. When she got to the square in the carpet that marked the trap door, she shifted all her weight forward and heard a surprised yelp from Feedback as she tumbled forward and vanished.

Tweed followed close behind. As the twins disappeared headfirst into darkness, they heard the boys dropping to the floor and scurrying in their wake.

“If this was a video game,” Feedback lamented, “I'd be online looking for cheat codes right now! This is craaaaaaaazy ………”

 

11
THE
MAGNIFICENT
TWO
THREE
FIVE
SEVEN

O
ne by one, Cheryl, Tweed, Pilot, Artie and Feedback fell headfirst through the trap door, down a steeply angled narrow passage and out into a gloomy, cavernous room in a rain of books and knick-knacks. One by one, they tumbled out onto a bare stone floor. Groaning and rubbing at a variety of bruised knees and elbows, the quintet slowly got to their feet and looked around.

As Feedback stood, the last of the books that had accompanied them on their mad dash down the chute dropped on his head, sending up a little cloud of dust. Feedback sneezed loud enough to rattle the small, barred windows set high up in the walls. They were, quite obviously, in the basement of the house. Feedback sneezed again.

“A-zoom-tight!” Artie said.

“I think you mean
gesundheit
, Art-Bart,” Pilot said, straightening his hat.

“I'm not up on my Greek.” Artie waved the matter away, and turned to examine the opening they'd all just tumbled through. Which was, of course, now closed. “Guess we'd better start looking for another way out again. Again.”

Artie bent down and picked up a book. It looked to be the one that had initially bashed him in the beak and he glared at it reproachfully. But, realizing that it was hefty enough to use as a bashing implement in case of another spectral attack, he tucked it under his arm. Then he turned and started knocking on walls and pipes and squinting at cracks in the plaster with one eye squeezed shut.

“Hey, guys?” Feedback stopped Cheryl and Tweed for a moment. “Uh … thanks.”

“For what?” Tweed asked.

“For letting me in on that ACTION!! game thing. That was cool.”

“No problem,” Cheryl said. “We find it kinda helps get you motivated in situations like that one.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it did. Like … playing a video game, only for real.” He grinned, looking a little more at ease. “And I've never had my own alter-ego and catch-phrase!”

They spread out, tentatively exploring the shadow-shrouded space. Truthfully, it did sort of look a bit like a laundry room, only without anything that even remotely
resembled a modern washer/dryer set. A wide wooden doorway covered with a curtain was set into one wall. Cheryl pushed the curtain aside and then jumped back, in case something leaped out at them.

The curtain just swayed ominously in a non-existent breeze. But at least that was all that happened, for the time being. The twins stepped over the threshold into the other room, Feedback following close behind. He didn't really seem to want to let the twins out of his sight. The room beyond was dimly lit by the flickering purple glow of a half-dozen or so clear glass globes filled with fiery, dancing filaments of energy that looked like lightning captured in a ball. They were scattered around the place, on stands or on the long tables that took up most of the space and held a vast jumbled assortment of wacky-looking, mad-scientist-y, laboratory equipment.

“Coooool!” Feedback said, trotting over to the nearest light-ball, all thoughts of immediate peril once again driven from his techno-head at the prospect of examining some funky gadgetry. “These things are plasma globes! I tried to order one off the internet but my folks said it was a waste of my babysitter money.”

He touched a fingertip to the curved surface of the glass globe, and the glowing filaments inside all gathered into one tendril and followed his fingertip around like an eager puppy. “You know you can power a fluorescent light tube just by touching it to the surface of one of these things?”

Cheryl and Tweed nodded absently as Feedback chattered excitedly. They might not have known the proper names or real-world applications for the weird fixtures scattered about the room, but they
instantly
recognized them as B-movie standard-issue mad-scientist-lab accoutrements—including a machine bristling with a pair of antennae that crackled with threads of electricity zipping upward at regular intervals. To Cheryl it looked like something right out of the lab from the original black-and-white Frankenstein movie, and it was surrounded on all sides by coiled glass tubes and beakers and flasks filled with greenish, smoking liquids, bubbling atop the Bunsen burners that furnished the room. In one corner, a bulky shape stood shrouded by a ghostly looking dropsheet. When Cheryl peeked beneath a corner of the cloth, all she could make out were cogs and wheels and gears and machine-y bits all half-jumbled together, mid-assembly, into some kind of diabolical-looking device.

“Well. If it isn't the Wiggins Weirdos,” sneered a voice in the darkness.

The twins spun around to see Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi standing half-hidden by a rack of test tubes filled with various coloured liquids.

“What are you two doing here?” Cindy asked accusingly, flipping one of her blonde braids back over her shoulder. It seemed less sleekly coiffed than usual and was starting to frazzle a bit like frayed rope at the end.

“Cindy …” Hazel rolled her dark-brown eyes and nudged her sitter partner sharply with an elbow, mur- muring, “Put a cork in it, okay? Maybe they're here to help us. And frankly? We could use it.”

“But—”

“Seriously. We were in this house for, like, less than ten minutes when we fell down a trap door and couldn't get out.”

“Oh. And they can?”

“Maybe.” Cheryl shrugged.

“Right.” Cindy's lip curled in a sneer. “
You
obviously fell for the trap door trap, too.”

“Not exactly,” Tweed said. “We knew it was there. We just used it as a door. Not a trap.”

“I don't believe that for a second,” Cindy muttered.

“It's true,” Feedback said, stepping forward. “And they saved my butt in the process.”

“Hey, Karl,” Hazel said, attempting to muster up an appropriate level of adversarial-ness. “Never really expected to see you hanging out with the loony two. Couldn't handle the Great Sitter Challenge on your own?”

“Hey, Hazel,” he said back, “I never really expected to either. But I think I picked a pretty good team to be on.
They
were smart enough to bring granola bars, at least.”

Hazel's lips pressed into a thin smile and she stepped to one side gesturing to a substantial pile of crimped,
brightly coloured paper cupcake wrappers, all empty, and several prettily decorated biscuit tins that contained nothing but crumbs and crumpled bits of waxed paper.

Did
all
the other sitters in town head to their gigs on empty, growling stomachs with the prospect of epic kitchen raids in mind? the twins wondered.

“Sitter challenge number one,” Hazel said. “Locate and acquire provisions. Accomplished in style.”

“I guess that was before you fell through the trap door, huh?” Tweed asked dryly. “Which number's that one again?”