My Haunted House (6 page)

I
could not believe it. There was the sunglasses woman gazing into space like her best dream ever had just come true.

Then the frog man got up and waved a few bats away, and
he
said, “Perfect! It's even better than we expected, isn't it, dear?”

“It is,” agreed the sunglasses woman. She turned to Aunt Tabby and shook her hand. “What a
wonderful
welcome,” she said.
“Thank you
so
much.”

And then the small boring one heaved herself out of the pillowcase and said in a really
stupid
squeaky voice, “I'd
love
to live here; it's
so
exciting.” She tugged at the woman's sticky sleeve and pestered her, “Can we live here, Mom? Please, please,
please
can we, Mom?”

“Of course, dear.” The sunglasses woman smiled.

Huh. I really don't think it is good to give in to children who pester, especially irritating ones with squeaky voices.

But the sunglasses woman went right ahead and said to Aunt Tabby, “This house is perfect. We'll take it. We can move in tomorrow!”

What?
Now I really could
not
believe it. It had been the best Awful Ambush I could possibly have done. Everything had worked perfectly—even Sir Horace had turned up. But not only had the weird people
liked
it, it had made them
want
to buy the house. What more could I do? So I yelled at them.

“GO AWAY!” I shouted as loud as I could. It was great yelling from so high; it echoed around and around the hall, and everyone looked up. Three of them looked amazed and one looked annoyed. “You
can't
live here,” I yelled at the top of my voice. “It's
my
house and
I
live here.
GO AWAY!
”

The annoyed one opened her mouth to say something, but I got in first. “It's all
your
fault, Aunt Tabby!” I told her. “You never asked me about selling the house, and you never asked Uncle Drac, either. You just
told
us what you had decided to do. It's
not
fair. We
all
live here, not just
you
. And I want to
stay
living here and I'm not going, I'm NOT!”

Aunt Tabby wiped the soot and flour and strawberry Jell-O and spiders off her face. “Well,” she said, “making a disgusting mess doesn't exactly make me want to stay here, Araminta. The place is difficult enough to keep clean as it is. I suggest we all go and have a cup of tea and talk about it. I'm sure you'll feel better about things when you have talked to Mr. and Mrs. Wizzard.”

The weird people followed Aunt Tabby
down the stairs to the kitchens. Just before they disappeared, the stupid short one looked up at the balcony. I stuck out my tongue and gave her my best Fiendish Stare. That showed her.

“What a twit,” I said to Edmund.

And can you guess what Edmund said? It was
completely
idiotic. He said,
“I thought she looked all right.”
I thought she looked all right!
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I gave him my Fiendish Stare as well, and he shot off into Sir Horace's room, but I followed him. I had a Last Chance Plan, and I needed Edmund's help.

“You've got to come down to the kitchen with me,” I told Edmund, who had backed into a corner. “If they saw a
real
ghost, they wouldn't last five seconds.”

“You said that before,”
Edmund said, in an irritating way,
“and they're still here. Anyway, I think they're nice. I'd like them to stay.”

“Look, Edmund,” I told him, as he obviously had
not
got the point, “if
they
stay,
I
have to go. You wouldn't want that, would you?”

Well, that told
him
. He didn't say anything at all; he just floated off and headed for the crummy old ladder. But there was no way I was going to let him get away. “Edmund!” I yelled.

“What?”
he said in a really grumpy voice.

“You're Sir Horace's page, aren't you?” I asked him.

“Yes…”
he said.

“So—you're meant to do what he tells you, aren't you?”

“Ye-es…”

“And Sir Horace told you to help me,
didn't he
?”

“Yes…”
He sighed just like Aunt Tabby does when the boiler has done something really annoying.

“Well, I need you to
help me
get rid of all those horrible people. Right now. I want you to come with me and scare them away.”

“All right,”
said Edmund in a sulky voice.

But I didn't care how sulky he was. This was my Last Chance Plan, and it
had
to work.

U
ncle Drac was part of the Last Chance Plan as well. I could see that Edmund was probably not up to the job. It would be just like him to float off at the wrong moment, or not be scary enough. So I needed Uncle Drac, too, because I knew he would be on my side.

I was just about to open the little door to the bat turret when it flew open and Uncle
Drac fell out onto the landing.

“Oh, Minty, Minty,” he said, “something terrible has happened. All my bats have gone.”

“No they haven't,” I told him.

“Yes they have. They've—”

“Uncle Drac,” I said sternly, “while you've just been hanging up there asleep doing nothing but snore, Aunt Tabby has gone and
sold our house
!”

Uncle Drac looked confused. He doesn't like being awake during the day. “Wha-at?” he mumbled.

“There are three weird people here, Uncle Drac—and one of them is really yucky, you wouldn't believe it, she's
so stupid
—and Aunt Tabby
is selling them our house
!”

“Eh?” Uncle Drac can be really slow at
times. I just grabbed hold of him and pulled him along with me.

“You can come out now!” I yelled to Edmund, who had been sulking in the secret passage. He floated out.

“Who's that, Minty?” Uncle Drac asked me when he saw Edmund.

“That's Edmund, Uncle Drac. And if you can't get Aunt Tabby to change her mind about selling our house, he's going to scare those people away.”

Uncle Drac kept looking behind him as Edmund followed us down the stairs. “He doesn't look very well, Minty. What's wrong with him?” he whispered.

“He's dead, Uncle Drac.”

“Dead?”
Uncle Drac suddenly looked as pale as Edmund.

“He's a
ghost
,” I told him very patiently. “Now come on
quick
before Aunt Tabby sells the house and you have to start packing up all the bats.”

“My bats.
Where
did you say my bats were, Minty?”

“I didn't, Uncle Drac. Just hurry up, please.
Both
of you.”

 

How I got Edmund and Uncle Drac down to the third-kitchen-on-the-right-just-around-
the-corner-past-the-boiler-room I don't know. But I did.

Everyone was sitting around the table, and Aunt Tabby was pouring some tea.

“Ah, Drac,” said Aunt Tabby, looking up from the teapot. “I'm glad you're here. And Araminta. And, er—who's your friend, Araminta? He looks very pale. Would he like a hot drink?”

“This is Edmund,” I told her. “And he wouldn't like anything, thank you. He's a ghost.”

I looked around to see what effect that would have on the weird people, but they just gazed at Edmund and looked even more excited.

“Oh how
wonderful,
” cooed the sunglasses woman. “A little boy ghost. He's so
sweet.
Hello, Edmund dear.”

“Hello,”
whispered Edmund.

“Listen, Edmund,” I hissed, “‘Hello' is just not good enough. Can't you manage a bloodcurdling howl or something?”

But Edmund didn't do anything. He just hovered by the door in a very boring and unscary way with a silly smile on his face. Being a ghost was wasted on Edmund, I thought. If I was a ghost, I'd have been howling around the kitchen, screeching and hurling all the things off the table—and that would have been just for starters.

The small Wizzard person was grinning at Edmund, so I made my wide-mouth frog face at her. But she just giggled. And then something really weird happened. She picked up the glass of orange juice that Aunt Tabby
had just poured for her and suddenly it fizzed up over the glass and
turned blue
. For a moment I hoped that perhaps Aunt Tabby had had a change of heart and was trying to poison her, but the Wizzard man said, “Stop playing with your drink, Wanda.”

Wanda clicked her fingers and changed it back to
orange
orange juice again. Show-off. Then she took four pet mice out of her pocket and put them on the table in front of her. The
mice started doing handstands and cartwheels around her glass. Double show-off.

Uncle Drac shuffled in past Edmund, and Aunt Tabby made him sit down next to her. “Drac dear,” said Aunt Tabby, “this is Brenda, Barry, and Wanda Wizzard, and they are going to buy our house. Isn't that lovely?”

Uncle Drac didn't say anything. He was looking at me—in fact
everyone
was looking at me—so I turned my wide-mouth frog face into my cross-eyed wide-mouth frog face.

Aunt Tabby sighed. “But as you can tell, Drac, Araminta's being a bit…difficult.”

“Wait a minute, Tabby,” mumbled Uncle Drac, blinking a bit. Uncle Drac has trouble seeing in the light, and sometimes I think he is like a great big bat himself. “Do we really
have
to sell the house?” he said. “Minty
is very upset, and my bats are behaving very strangely.”

“And so,” Aunt Tabby told him, “is the boiler. As
usual.
And I am
not
putting up with that boiler
anymore,
Drac. I
mean
it.”

“Oh, dear,” mumbled Uncle Drac.

I could see that Uncle Drac was going to let Aunt Tabby win—as usual—so I said, “Uncle Drac, you have to do something.
Please
.”

“Do I?” he said, looking worried.

“Yes,” I told him. “You
do
.”

 

I sat down opposite him and looked at him. I didn't do a wide-mouth frog face or even a Fiendish Stare. I just looked at him like it was really important. Which it was.

Uncle Drac coughed a bit and then he said, “Tabby dear, I am sorry about the boiler. I do realize I have neglected it recently and left you to do all the work. I know it wasn't fair, and I promise that from now on I will share the boiler cleaning—”

“And the kindling chopping and the coal fetching,” put in Aunt Tabby.

“Er, yes, and that too.”

“And the emptying and the lighting and the—”

“Yes, yes, I'll do that as well.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” said good old Uncle Drac.

Aunt Tabby sat down rather suddenly. “Well,” she said, “I've had some shocks today, Drac, but having you offer to share all the boiler work is the biggest one so far.”

“Does that mean you're not going to sell the house?” I asked Aunt Tabby.

“Yes, all right then, Araminta.” Aunt Tabby sighed. “I'm not going to sell the house.”

“Ya-ay!” I yelled.

“Oh,” mumbled the Wizzard people.

“I'm very sorry,” Aunt Tabby told them, “but the house is not for sale anymore. Would you like another cup of tea?”

“No, thank you,” said the Wizzard woman, sighing. “We had better be going.”

About time, too, I thought—but she didn't get up. Instead she said, “Er, I couldn't help noticing that you had a model three with
double ash bins and a reverse riddler. It is in fact one of the very rare B Series.”

“A serious what?” asked Aunt Tabby.

“Your boiler. I wondered if I could take a little peek at it before I go. They are very unusual nowadays, you know.” Aunt Tabby looked at the Wizzard woman like she was crazy, but she took her off to the boiler room even so.

When they'd gone, Uncle Drac heaved himself out of his chair. “Must go and find all my bats,” he said.

“Need any help?” asked the Wizzard man. “They can be difficult to catch on your own.”

“Thanks,” said Uncle Drac, and he and the Wizzard man went off to find the bats.

“I too must take my leave,”
said Edmund, and he floated off through the kitchen wall.

“'Bye Edmund,” said the show-off Wizzard girl.

“Farewell, Wanda,”
said Edmund's voice from somewhere inside the wall.

That left me and the Wanda Wizzard girl together. “I could show you how to turn your orange juice blue if you like,” she offered.

I thought she might as well. After all, you never know when a trick like that might come in handy, do you?

So I said, “Okay.”