The Ghost of Gruesome High (13 page)

Right then, right there, at that exact moment, I broke up with Jason. I didn’t say anything. I simply let go. It was that simple. It was exactly like holding the string of a balloon, holding it tight, afraid of what might happen if you let go—and then you just open your hand and release it.

I stood there, looking at that beautiful little house, with the golden rays of the sun dancing on it in a million different patterns that changed and shifted with each passing second, and watched that balloon float gently into the sky of my mind, until it was nothing but a tiny speck, and then was gone entirely.

I thought I would feel bad, but I didn’t.

I felt good.

I felt as if a big weight had been lifted off me.

I felt liberated! I couldn’t stop myself. I suddenly raised up on one toe and spun around with my arms outstretched.
 

I was free.

And so was Jason.

I looked at Jason with new eyes. I no longer cared deeply about what he thought. I no longer had to worry about him. Do you have any idea how great that felt?

I suddenly smiled and laughed out loud.

Jason looked at me, totally perplexed. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked crossly. “Have you totally lost it?”

“No,” I smiled, punching him lightly on the arm. “But you have.”

He looked at me from under furrowed brows and shook his head, but before he could say anything we heard a voice calling to us. “Hullllooooooo!” the voice said.

We both turned and looked at the house, unable for a moment to determine precisely where the voice had come from. “Up here,” the happy voice said. “Up here!”

We both looked up at the roof of the sparkling house and standing there, waving at us, was Mr. bell, dressed from toe to head in aluminum foil. In the fading light he almost blended into the roof of the house even while he was waving.

I smiled real big and waved back. “Hi Mr. Bell! It’s Patsy Hoyle! Can we talk to you?”

Jason whispered between clenched teeth: “Hold onto your sanity, we’re entering the Twilight Zone.” Then he did a bad impression of the Twilight Zone theme song without opening his teeth.

Two minutes ago that would have bothered me. But not now. Now I was free of Jason. Now I could ignore him and his immature behavior. None of it had anything to do with me any more.

I turned my back on Jason, ignoring him completely, and walked toward Mr. Bell, who was lumbering toward the edge of the roof in the stiff-legged walking style he had, presumably so he wouldn’t wrinkle his aluminum-foil pants.

“Be careful, Mr. Bell,” I yelled as he half-stepped half-jumped over one of the hundreds of aluminum-foil satellite dishes that dotted his roof.
 

But my warning came too late! I watched in horror as Mr. Bell tottered for a moment on one stiff leg, bouncing around, trying to catch his balance as if he were on a pogo stick. I heard him mutter: “Oh no!” and then he fell!

Chapter 20

Like a giant TV dinner

“Mr. Bell!” I yelled. I ran to the spot where he had fallen. He had landed flat on his back, but fortunately he landed on two large, aluminum-foil-ball “satellite dishes.” The “dishes” were smashed flat, having absorbed the impact. Mr. Bell just lay there, barely moving. But I could see he was breathing. “Mr. Bell, are you all right?”

For a moment he lay still, then, quite suddenly, his eyes popped open. I think I jumped back a little when they did. His eyes darted all around, then finally fixed on my face. “Did I fall off the roof again?” he asked.

I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, you did,” I answered. I could feel Jason come up from behind me, and I could hear the others running up. “Is anything broken? Can you sit up?” I asked.

Mr. Bell sat up slowly, feeling his arms and his legs as he did so. “Everything seems A-O.K.,” he said. Then, suddenly, he reached up and felt the aluminum-foil satellite dish on top of his head. I’m afraid it didn’t survived the fall nearly so well as Mr. Bell. It looked like a total write-off. “Oh my! This will never do. Not tonight. Not tonight of all nights!”

Mr. Bell began scrambling like a turtle on its back, trying to stand without bending his legs. “Help me up, will you?” he finally asked.
 

I stepped back and allowed Jason, Alan, and Wesley to lift Mr. Bell to a standing position. Once he was standing, Mr. Bell smiled, then looked directly at Wesley and said: “Thank you, young man. That was most kind.”

For a moment Wesley didn’t know what to say. Finally he looked down and mumbled: “That’s O.K.”

I smiled at Wesley and poked him in the ribs. He finally glanced at me, then smiled and looked up. I could tell he wasn’t so scared of Mr. Bell any more. He leaned close to me and whispered: “We heard you yell. We didn’t know what had happened.”

I grabbed Wesley’s arm and squeezed it. “Thanks!” I whispered back.

Then I turned my attention back to Mr. Bell. I took one of his arms and began walking him slowly toward the door of his house. “Why don’t we go inside, Mr. Bell. Maybe you should sit down for a minute. Are you sure you’re O.K.?”

“Fine and dandy!” he said enthusiastically. Then he reached up and again felt the crushed remains of the aluminum-foil dish that used to be on top of his head. “But I have to fix my dish. Tonight’s an important night. They told me to be ready for a very important message. Tonight. At midnight.”

“I’m sure we’ll have everything ready by then,” I said. “Don’t you have a spare dish you could use for tonight?”

By this time we had gotten him inside his house. I was still amazed by the hundreds of TV monitors lining the walls of his living room. There were everything from twelve inch black and white monitors to twenty-eight inch Sony color monitors. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for the way they were grouped. It looked like he just mounted the first one randomly, then began filling in every square inch of bare wall with additional monitors as he got them. I helped him sit in the one and only chair in the room; he kept his legs stiff and his back stiff, not wanting to wrinkle his aluminum-foil suit.
 

“An extra dish?” he said suddenly. “Of course!” He looked at me and smiled. “I don’t have to make another dish tonight. I can use one of the spare dishes!” He laughed and slapped an aluminum-foil-covered hand against an aluminum-foil-covered thigh. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, young lady!”

“Thank you,” I said. “Mr. Bell, I need you to help me with something. It’s very important.”

He looked deeply into my eyes. I could feel him touching my very soul. It was slightly unsettling—but at the same time it felt exhilarating. I’d never had someone look that deeply into my eyes before. “Yes. I can see it’s important. Whatever I can do, you can count on me.” He smiled and patted my hand. “What do you need?”

I took a deep breath and just asked him straight out. “I need you to come with us to Grissom High School and show us the exact spot where you found that gold coin you showed us.”

Mr. Bell squirmed slightly. It might have been because he was so uncomfortable sitting ram-rod straight the way he was, but I had the feeling it was because he was uncomfortable about something else. “I-I haven’t been away from my house in more than five years,” he said quietly, no longer looking me in the eye. “I don’t know if I can leave any more.”

“If you’re worried about getting back before midnight, I guarantee we won’t keep you away more than a couple of hours. You’ll be back in plenty of time for tonight’s . . .”

He took my hand between his and squeezed it gently. “It’s not that, my dear. It’s-it’s hard to explain, really. I just don’t know if I can leave.”

“Agoraphobia,” Alan said quietly.

We all turned to look at him. It was almost the first word he’d said since we picked him up. “What?” I asked.

“Agoraphobia is the fear of leaving one’s house. It’s a real mental condition,” he said in his normal lecturing voice—but then he suddenly realized that maybe he shouldn’t be saying that in front of Mr. Bell and stopped talking.

Everyone looked at Mr. Bell to see if we had hurt his feelings. For a moment he seemed unaware of why everyone was looking at him. Then he smiled and almost laughed. “The boy is right. It is a mental condition. I’m not offended. I really don’t know how severe a case I have since I haven’t even tried to leave here for more than four years.”

“Four years? Here?” Jennifer asked as if she couldn’t quite fathom what the words meant. “You haven’t been out of this house in four years?”

“Well, I do walk around the yard,” Mr. Bell said, looking at all of us. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. One of my monitors is tuned to the stock market channel. I keep in touch with my broker by phone as often as I need to. He makes sure I have the money I need. Mr. Brown at the local store drops off groceries twice a week. I’m really quite happy,” he said, looking sincerely at each of us. “Really.”

I smiled back at him. “Mr. Bell, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t important. Please. For me?”

He looked me in the eyes once more and smiled warmly as he took my hand in his. “For you, my dear, I would attempt anything. Help me up.”

I held one hand, Jason and Wesley held his other as we pulled him to a stiff-legged standing position. As soon as he stabilized himself, he smiled and said: “Well, let’s get the show on the road!” And he began to walk stiff-legged toward the door. I smiled and followed. The others followed me. I could see them shaking their heads in amazement out of the corner of my eyes.

It took a good twenty minutes to load Mr. Bell into Wesley’s VW. The problem was, Mr. Bell couldn’t bend enough to crawl in the door, or to sit on the seat even if he had been able to make it through the door.

It took a bit of doing, but we finally opened Wesley’s sun roof and lowered Mr. Bell feet first through it. That way he could stand all the way to the school, with his head sticking up out of the top of the car.

It was a brilliant idea, and we have to thank Alan for coming up with it first. Not only did it keep Mr. Bell from having to sit all scrunched up in the bug, but it also made him feel less confined and seemed to help his agoraphobia.

I’m sure we were quite a sight, with five kids crammed into a VW bug while an adult dressed from head to foot in aluminum foil rode standing up, his head and upper body poking up like some kind of weird car billboard advertising giant TV dinners or something.

Chapter 21

“X” doesn’t mark the spot!

With Mr. Bell sticking out the top of Wesley’s car, and the rest of us packed inside the bug like sardines, Wesley drove extra slow. It took us almost a full hour to get from Mr. Bell’s house to the bottom of Grissom Hill.
 

And then the fun really started!

Wesley’s little bug had to strain and struggle to make it up the hill with all of us onboard! We kept cheering every time we made it a few yards, and booing every time we slipped back. Even Mr. Bell was cheering and booing and waving his aluminum-covered hands to coax us on!

All of us were having a great time—except for Wesley, who kept muttering and swearing under his breath, and threatening to charge us all for a new clutch. Finally, after about fifteen minutes of starts and stops and jerks, the little bug crested the top of the hill and Wesley turned into the student parking lot to a round of cheers from everyone, including Mr. Bell.

I was worried that Mr. Bell might be having a hard time now that we were so far away from his house, but as we all oozed out of the sardine can Wesley called his car, I could see that Mr. Bell was smiling and enjoying himself. I guess his agoraphobia wasn’t too bad after all.

And besides, if he had to leave his house after four years, he couldn’t have picked a better bunch of kids to have gone off with on an adventure! This was already a night he’d never forget!

After all of us had climbed out of the car and gotten the blood flowing again, Wesley and Jason positioned themselves behind Mr. Bell, each guy lifting up on one of Mr. Bell’s arms, while Alan lifted up on Mr. Bell’s legs from inside the car. It only took a couple of minutes to get Mr. Bell out of the car, and then slide him down to the ground.

The moment his feet touched the blacktop of the parking lot I saw a flash of fear go through his eyes. I immediately grabbed hold of one of his arms and motioned for Jennifer to hold his other arm. “Everything’s O.K., Mr. Bell,” I said as brightly as I could. “This shouldn’t take long, and then we’ll get you right back home.”

Mr. Bell didn’t say a word. He forced a smile and nodded—but I could see fear building up behind his eyes. I knew we didn’t have much time before he would have to be taken back home, so I immediately started leading him to the spot I thought the coins and the body would be buried.

I mentioned before that the campus was dotted with elm trees. Before the school was built the hill was covered with elm trees. In fact, the original cemetery, which the city stopped using in 1911, was called Elm Hill Cemetery. Most of the people buried here were poor people that the city had to bury. Most had no family or friends. I guess that’s why no one cared when the school was built on top of the old graves.

Anyway, the quad area of the campus is covered with cement. It’s quite a large area, and right in the middle is a rather good-sized “planter” in which is growing the largest elm tree on campus. In fact, it’s referred to as the Campus Elm. A plaque embedded in the cement around the planter says it is one of the original elm trees growing on the hill before the school was built.