The Haunting of Heck House (18 page)

“A spectral life with a really bad temper,” Artie muttered, tossing the book that had conked him on the noggin onto a stair and slumping down beside it. Ramshackle appeared from the study and wandered over to head-butt him on the knee. Artie gave him a skritch behind his horn stubs and the little monster began to purr.

“Honestly,” Simon continued in a scolding tone, “didn't anyone ever tell you people that messing around with otherworldly portals should only be handled by experts?”

“Um …
you
were an expert there, too, weren't you, Speakie?” Cheryl pointed out.

The glare from the Spirit Stone narrowed. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“D'you think Cindy and Hazel will send help?” Artie wondered.

“Ha. I doubt it,” Feedback scoffed, an expression of disdain curling his lip. “I know how those two operate and I'd bet my Xbox that they probably hoodwinked their folks, too, so they could come here tonight. They won't tell anyone 'cause they don't want anyone to know they were here!”

Cheryl frowned. “But …”

“Feedback's right, pal,” Tweed said. “We know how competitive Cindy and Hazel are. And we know what they think about us.”

“We're not
weird
,” Cheryl grumbled.

“Sure we are!” Tweed said brightly (well, as brightly as she ever actually said anything). “And we should be proud of that. We're not like everyone else. And we're not like Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi. We'd help them. I mean, we'd at least think about it.”

Pilot shrugged. “I dunno. I'm inclined to cut 'em some slack on not sending help,
only
because I don't even think they think we're in really real trouble. You heard them. They think you two were behind all those spooky shenanigans just so you guys could win the sitter contest!”

“Arggh!” Cheryl screwed up her face and thrust Simon the speaker at Tweed. Her frustration at their entrapment boiling over again, she turned to pound on the door with both fists. Then with the fireplace poker. “Let us out, you haunted Heck House! Let! Us! OUT!!” The heavy oak planking shuddered beneath the blows and the doorknob began to glow angrily again. “LET US GO!!” she shouted as she continued her assault.

The others watched, astonished, until Ramshackle suddenly let out a loud “MrrORWrr!” and Cheryl froze, poker held high.

“What was that?” she asked, gasping for breath.

“He said, ‘That's just what
they
keep saying,'” Artie said.

She turned and shot Artie a questioning look. He shrugged and bent an ear toward the little gargoyle and listened while the thing growled and grumbled. After a few moments, he turned back to the twins. “The kids— whatstheirnames—Ramshackle said that's what
they
keep saying.”

“Let them out from where?” Tweed asked. “Seems to me they've been roaming free all over this old house!”

Ramshackle shook his head at the word
free
.

“Well …” Tweed frowned. “If that's
not
the case, where are they now?”

The gargoyle turned to glare pointedly up the stairs as the angry green glow from the doorknob faded back to almost nothing. Cheryl gazed up the stairs and she remembered the dressing room—and the things she'd thought she'd seen, moving behind the mirror glass …

“I think I know,” she said. “C'mon, guys. We're gonna get to the bottom of this once and for all. Tweed? Follow me. Bring Speaker Boy.”

“What are we going to do?” Tweed asked as she ran up the stairs beside her cousin.

“We're gonna take a page from Freddy and Marlene's movie script,” Cheryl said.

“You mean
Ding Dong, You're Dead
Freddy and Marlene?” Tweed thought back to the hapless haunted couple in the movie they'd watched only the night before.
It seemed like ages ago. “You mean … we're going to scream and flail and generally run around like idiots?”

“Yup,” Cheryl said, reaching the landing and turning left. The door to the library they'd been locked inside once again stood wide open. “Well, no. Not really. But we are going to hold a seance.”

“I think that's a great idea,” Tweed said grimly.

Because look how well it had turned out for Freddy and Marlene.

 

13
THE
GHOSTS
AND
MR. SPEAKER

W
hen Cheryl and Tweed poked their heads into the library, they weren't entirely surprised to see that it had been returned to a state of relative normalcy. Books were back on shelves, the goo was gone and only a faint whiff of eau-de-rotten-egg perfume lingered in the air. Even the grand piano was back in the middle of the black-and-white rug—all in one piece, not a key out of place!

“Huh,” Cheryl whispered. “I was wondering what had happened to the wreckage …”

“Weird,” Tweed whispered back. “The house rebuilt it. Just like it rebuilt itself.”

Cheryl tugged her by the sleeve across the hall into the dressing room and the others followed. She motioned for Tweed to hand over the speaker and turned it so the ruby
eye was facing her. “You were a … a whaddayacallit back in the day, right?” Cheryl said to Simon. “A medium?”

“I always thought of myself as rather well-done!” the speaker answered and laughed at his own joke.

Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Look here, Speakie. There's something more to these ghosts than meets the eye. Er, what I mean by that is, we've never actually seen them. Only heard them. I don't think they're strong enough to appear to us. I think there is something preventing them from really showing up to the show. I wanna know what that something is.” She turned to her cousin. “When we were in here before, I thought I saw—actually
saw
— them. Sort of. In those mirrors there.”

Tweed kneeled down to examine the surface of the glass. “There are handprints—on the
inside
!”

“Exactly!” Cheryl nodded, leaning over her cousin's shoulder to examine the smudgy marks that had vanished earlier and had now reappeared. As if by … magic!

“You think they're—what—trapped in there?” Pilot asked. “Prisoners?”

“That's dastardly!” Artie exclaimed.

“Let's find out,” Cheryl said. “Somebody go grab that crystal ball off the table in the library.” She sank down cross-legged in the middle of the plush dressing-room carpet.

“I'll do it!” Feedback scurried off.

Cheryl told the others to join her in a circle on the floor and asked Tweed, who, between the two of them,
was the film-based expert on the occult, to explain what they were about to do.

“A seance,” Pilot said uneasily.

“Like in the movies.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You said we needed monster-mashers, Flyboy.” Artie snickered. “Be careful what you wish for!”

Pilot bit his tongue and let the twins do their thing.

“There are several different methodologies,” Tweed said in a scholarly tone, “drawn from several different sources.”

Cheryl nodded decisively as she attempted to fold her legs into the Lotus position. “Oh sure. You've got your straight-up general haunted house flicks—for example, our own expertly curated double bill—or you can go the more specialized seance-centric route with titles like just plain old
Seance!
or
Night of the Ghouls
or
Seance in Suite 777
…”

“
The Trouble with Seances
.” Tweed picked up the list. “
Ghost Host
,
The Crystal Ball Comrade
—a foreign film, obviously—
Hey, Spooky!
and
Hey, Spooky! 2: Electric Spookaloo
,
Host a Ghost
—”

“You already said
Host a Ghost
,” Feedback pointed out, coming in with the crystal ball.

“I already said
Ghost Host
,” Tweed corrected him.

“Oh.”

Feedback blinked and handed the crystal ball down to Cheryl. The thing was as big as a fishbowl—the kind
that could comfortably house a good-sized school of guppies—and surprisingly heavy, and she grunted with the effort of not dropping it as she placed it carefully on the floor in front of her.

“My point is, there are many variations on the procedure. But I think we should go for the straight-up classic,” Tweed said with assurance. “Crystal ball, pad of paper for auto-writing in case any of us gets possessed, some questions, some answers, and hopefully nobody's eyeballs explode.”

“Wait.” Artie blinked rapidly. “Is that an actual possibility?”

Tweed shrugged. “Maybe keep yours closed. You're kind of susceptible to weird stuff like that.”

Cheryl examined the crystal ball closely. It was large and heavy … and hollow, with a hole in the bottom concealed by the elaborate brass stand on which it stood. It would have been easy for a sham mystic to pump a little dry ice fog in through that opening or shine a light up from a hole in the table on which it stood.

“Huh,” Cheryl said and showed Tweed what she'd found.

“I'm thinking maybe our Mr. H wasn't
quite
as accomplished in the spectral arts as he professed to be,” Tweed said, her eyes narrowing.

The disembodied voice of Simon Omar, ex-mystic, sighed from where Tweed had instructed Cheryl to place him on the floor in the middle of their circle. “Can't
say as I blame the chap,” he said. “I'll tell you, it wasn't easy. You really had to be a special kind of nutcase to commune with the spirit plane.” His voice was instantly muffled when Cheryl suddenly plunked the oversized glass globe overtop of him like an astronaut's helmet. “I
was
that nutcase!”

“Good for you!” Cheryl enthused. “Be that nutcase again!”

“Right!”

Tweed told Pilot to cut the overhead lights and asked Feedback to light some of the candles that stood on the dressing-room vanity. When he couldn't find any matches, Feedback just shrugged and fired up the app on his phone that simulated a lighter flame and was useful for waving around at rock concerts during power ballads. Then, sitting in a circle on the floor, in the darkness and the silence, they waited.

“Okay …” Tweed whispered. “Any time now …”

“Psst.” Cheryl nudged Simon's globe with her toe. “Make like a mystic.”

“Hmm? Oh! Right …” He hemmed. “Been a while. Let's see if I can remember how to do this now … ah! I've got it. Hell
ooo
… spirit plane?”

“Are you sure it
wasn't
just a malfunctioning stage prop that blew him up?” Pilot asked.

“Shh!” Tweed shushed him.

“Er, knock knock …” The speaker tried again. “Anyone home?”

Silence.

“What's going on?” Artie asked, his eyes still squeezed shut behind his glasses. “My eyeballs aren't even tingling.”

“Shh!”
Cheryl shushed him.

The twins knew these things took time sometimes. It wasn't like just switching on a radio or—

Suddenly, they heard a sound like a switched-on radio coming from inside the crystal ball. A staticky sound, like the radio wasn't quite tuned to a station. Crackling and hissing and then a
weeeEEEOOoooOOWWwwee
noise filled the dressing room, as if an invisible hand was turning a dial trying to find a clear transmission.

Simon giggled and said, “Hey! That tickles!”

“Shh!” Tweed hushed him. “Concentrate.”

The inside of the crystal ball began to glow crimson with the brightening light of the Spirit Stone and to fill with wispy, vaporous smoke. Simon cleared his throat— or, at least, made a sound like it—and stifled another giggle.

“I think I might be picking up something,” he said, and his voice warbled strangely.

The misty wisps snaked out through the surface of the globe and into the room, slithering in serpentine fashion through the dark air, warping into grotesque faces and twisty, trailing limbs. Feedback's eyes were so wide Cheryl was afraid that, if anyone's eyeballs were going to explode, they'd be his, not Artie's. The digital flame on the screen of his phone suddenly began to flicker wildly.
Then it burst into a purple fireball and snuffed out, just like a real candle in a gust of wind.

“I think we've definitely attracted the attention of the spirit realm …” Simon said nervously.

Even without the phone light, there was enough pulsing crimson illumination in the room, coming from the crystal ball and its occupant, to confirm that Simon's assessment was a little on the conservative side. Attracted the spirit realm's attention? More like, invited them to a fancy-dress party!

The twins and their friends watched in astonishment as the vaporous entities floating about the room suddenly went for the racks of clothes and began to tug at them. A couple of the lace and satin dresses slipped from the hangers and began to swirl and float about the room like a pair of dancers at a ball, graceful and terrifying at the same time.

“Former occupants of the house, I think,” Simon murmured. “Having a bit of fun …”

Unable to resist peeking at what was happening, Artie had popped open one eye in time to see an identical suit to the one he was wearing jerk from its hanger like a puppet on strings. It flapped about awkwardly as a head on a long skinny neck and gangly limbs poked out of the collar and cuffs. The head bore the beaky-nosed face of an old man who peered through beady, angry eyes at the excessive lengths of wrist and ankle he was showing.

“Who shrunk my suit?” he demanded in a warbly voice. It would have been pretty hilarious if it wasn't quite so terrifying. Then he peered about the room. “Who are you gaggle of urchins?” he asked in an accusing screech. “What do ye here?”

“Uh … we … we're …” Cheryl stammered, her heart in her throat as the ghost's eyes blazed red.