My Haunted House
Authors: Angie Sage
As told to
Illustrated by
For
Araminta Clibborn,
with love
I
t all began when I was in my Thursday bedroom doing my ghost practice. I have always done regular ghost practice, as I was sure it would be much easier to find a ghost if the ghost thought that I was one too. I have always wanted to find a ghost, but you know, even though our house is called Spookie House, I have never, ever seen a single ghost, not even a very small one. I thought that Aunt
Tabby had scared them offâshe would scare me off if I were a ghost.
Anyway, I was busy doing my practice and I had my ghost sheet over my head, which is why I tripped over Sir Horace's left foot. Stupid thing. And then his left foot fell off, and Sir Horace collapsed into hundreds of
pieces. Stupid Sir Horace. And then all the bits of stupid Sir Horace rolled all over the floor, and I stepped on his head and got my foot stuck inside it. Don't worry, it wasn't a
real
head. Sir Horace is just a crummy old suit of armor that's always hanging around here, lurking in various dark corners.
I was yelling at it to get
off
and hopping around shaking my foot like crazy, but Sir Horace's stupid head was totally stuck. Then, with really great timing, Aunt Tabby shouted, “Breakfast!” in that if-you-don't-come-down-right-now-and-get-it-I-shall-give-it-to-the-cat voiceânot that we have a cat, but she would if we did have one, I know she would.
So I gave my foot the biggest shake everâin fact, I am surprised my whole leg didn't come offâand Sir Horace's helmet flew off,
shot out of the bedroom door, and hurtled down the attic stairs. It made a fantastic noise. I could hear it all the way down to the basement. Sound travels really well in this house, so I could easily hear Aunt Tabby's scream, too.
I thought I'd better get going, so I slid down the banister and hopped off at the landing. I wanted to see if Uncle Drac had gone to sleep yetâhe works nightsâbecause if he had, I was going to wake him up and make him come downstairs with me just in case Aunt Tabby was going to pitch a fit. His bedroom door is the little red one at the end of the top corridor, the one that goes to the turret.
I was very careful pushing the door open, as it's a sheer drop down for miles. Uncle Drac took all the floors out of the turret so that his bats could fly wherever they wanted.
Uncle Drac loves his bats; he'd do anything for them. I love bats too. They are
so
sweet.
I pushed Big Bat out of the way, and he fell all the way down to the bottom of the turret. It didn't matter, though, as the floor of the turret is about ten feet deep in bat poo, so it's very soft.
Without Big Bat clogging up the door, I could easily see Uncle Drac's sleeping bag. It was hanging from one of the joists like a great big flowery batâand it was empty. Great, I thought, he's still downstairs with Aunt Tabby. So, to save time, I slid down the big stairs' banister and the basement stairs' banister tooâwhich I'm not meant to do as it keeps falling overâand I was outside the second-kitchen-on-the-left-just-past-the-larder in no time. It was suspiciously quiet in there.
Oops, I thought, trouble.
I pushed open the door really considerately, and I was glad I did as Aunt Tabby was sitting at the end of the long table, buttering some toast in a way that made you think the toast had said something really personal and rude. It didn't look like a fun breakfast time, I thought. The signs were not good.
First not-good sign: sitting in the middle of the table was Sir Horace's helmet. It had a lot more dents in it than when I last saw it, but that was obviously not
my
fault as it was okay when it left my foot.
Second, third, fourth, and fifth not-good signs: Aunt Tabby was covered in sootâapart from two little windows in her glasses which she had wiped clear so that she could attack the toast. Aunt Tabby being covered in soot is
one of the worst signs. It means she has had a fight with the boiler and the boiler has won.
I sat down in my seat in a thoughtful and caring way. Uncle Drac looked really relieved to see me. You see, I live with my aunt and uncle because my parents went vampire hunting in Transylvania when I was little and they never came back.
Uncle Drac was busy scraping out the last bit of his boiled egg, and he had soot all around his mouth from the sooty toast that Aunt Tabby had buttered for him. “Hello, Minty,” he said.
“Hello, Uncle Drac,” I said. I tried to think of something nice to say to Aunt Tabby, but it was difficult to think of anything at all with Sir Horace's helmet staring at me with its little beady eyes. It doesn't really have eyes, of
course, but I often used to think it was looking at me, even though I was sure it was nothing more than an empty tin can.
Aunt Tabby plonked my bowl of oatmeal down in front of me, so I said, “Thank you, Aunt Tabby.” And then, because Aunt Tabby likes polite conversation at breakfast, I said, “Have you been having trouble with the boiler again, Aunt Tabby?”
“Yes, dearâbut
not
for very much longer,” Aunt Tabby said, hardly moving her lips. I used to think that when Aunt Tabby spoke like
that she was practicing to be a ventriloquist, but now I know it means she has made her mind up about something and she doesn't care whether you agree with her or not.
“Oh, why is that, Aunt Tabby?” I asked especially nicely, while I covered my oatmeal with brown sugar and stirred it all in really fast so that the oatmeal went a nice muddy color.
Aunt Tabby sort of gritted her teeth and said, “
Don't
do that with the sugar dear. Because we're
moving
, that's why.”
Not much stops me digging mud ditches in my oatmealâyou know, the ones where you scrape a channel through it and
it fills up with runny brown sugar, which I think looks just like mudâbut that did.
Moving
? What was she talking about? We couldn't possibly move, not before I'd found at least one ghost. And I wanted to find a vampire and a werewolf, too. I was sure there must be some in the cellar.
“Don't leave your mouth open when it is full, dear,” said Aunt Tabby, which I didn't think was fair as Uncle Drac had
his
mouth open too, and it was full of sooty toast, which looked disgusting.
Then Aunt Tabby fixed Uncle Drac with her Fiendish Stare (which is nearly as good as mine) and said, “Drac, this house is far too big for us. It is
dusty
and it is
dirty
, it is
freezing cold
and
full
of
spiders
. The boiler is a
menace
. We are moving to a nice, small, clean, modern
apartment
without a boiler
.”
“
Butâ
” I tried to interrupt, but it was no use. Aunt Tabby just kept on going.
“And when we have moved to an apartment, helmets from rusty old suits of armor won't keep landing on my toes, because we won't
have
any rusty old suits of armor. Sir Horace can go to the recycling bin. You can take him, Drac.”
“What?” said Uncle Drac, looking a bit like one of my old goldfish used to look when the water in the fish bowl got very low.
At last I got a word in, even though I still had a mouthful of oatmeal, which I had been too shocked to swallow. “But we
can't
leave this house,” I told Aunt Tabby. “
Nowhere
would ever be the same as this!”
“Exactly,” said Aunt Tabby, like I'd agreed
with her or something. “Nowhere could possibly be like this.”
I looked at Uncle DracâI needed some help here. Uncle Drac took the hint.
“Now, now, Tabby dear,” he murmured in his calm-down-Aunt-Tabby voice, “you know you don't mean it.”
“I
do
mean it, Drac,” Aunt Tabby told him. Then she tried to get me on her side. “And, Araminta dear, you often say you're lonely here. Just think, you would have lots of friends in a nice apartment house.”
She didn't succeed. “I don't care,” I told her. “I'd rather stay here than have a lot of dumb friends anyway.”
“Well, we will see about that,” said Aunt Tabby, with her mad ventriloquist look.
L
ater that morning I was looking out of my Thursday bedroom window and thinking about what Aunt Tabby had said. I always find it easier to think when I am doing something, so I was busy picking off lumps of peeling black paint from around the windows and throwing them at the monster statues out on the parapet.
It was lucky that I looked down and noticed
the man standing on the front doorstep. He was wearing a shiny blue suit and was staring up at the house while he wrote down notes on his clipboard. I knew what he was right awayâa real estate agent. I could see Aunt Tabby meant business.
Well, so did I.
So I got down from the window and hummed a happy tune to myself: “La-di-da, la-di-da, time to clean out the fish bowl.” I found the old bowl in a dark corner, where I had put it after Brian, my last goldfish, escaped. I don't know where Brian went, but he never came back. For sentimental reasons I had kept the bowl just as Brian had left it, so it was full of slime, old weeds, and some very smelly green water.
The real estate agent was standing right
underneath my window. I balanced the fish bowl on the windowsill and tipped it. The sludge landed
splat
right on him. Bull's eye!
The real estate agent had green goo all over his head and his shiny blue suit. He just stood there for a momentâlike he was really surprisedâand spat out some bits of slippery weed. Then he looked up, and I aimed my Fiendish Stare at him.
He made a weird, spluttery, yelping noise and ran off down the path.
Good riddance.
Â
At lunchtime in the third-kitchen-on-the-right-just-around-the-corner-past-the-boiler-room, I was not surprised to see that Aunt Tabby looked just as crabby as she had at breakfast.
“These real estate agents are really
most
unreliable,” she said as she stabbed a defenseless potato and thumped it down on my plate. “I have been waiting all morning for one, but he hasn't even bothered to turn up.”
I didn't say anything. Aunt Tabby looked at me for a moment and then she said, “I shall put my own sign up this afternoon. You'll
enjoy helping me paint it, Araminta.”
“Won't,” I told her.
Â
I tried to avoid Aunt Tabby in the afternoon, but she found me down in the cellar looking for vampires and dragged me out to the garden.
“It's a lovely day, Araminta,” she burbled. “Some sunshine would do you good. You are looking quite pale.”
Well, of course I was looking pale. It was because of the chalk dust all over my face. Vampire hunting is the same as ghost huntingâyou have to look like one of them to have any chance of finding one. I think I look pretty good as a vampire, although I would like to grow my teeth, too (but when I asked the dentist how I could do that, she
was not exactly helpful).
Aunt Tabby had cleared a patch of stinging nettlesâstinging nettles are what grow best in our gardenâand she had dumped down a piece of board and some old paints. Aunt Tabby thinks she's an artist, but I have my doubts.
“Come on, dear,” she said, patting the ground beside her like we were going to have a picnic or something, “you know you love painting.”
“Don't,” I told her.
So I sat on the steps and kicked them, which is quite fun as they are very crumbly and you can often get big lumps of stone to drop off. I watched Aunt Tabby really go for the paint in a big way until she had covered herself in as much paint as she had put on the
board. When she had run out of paint, Aunt Tabby fixed the board to a post and stuck it in the hedge.
The sign said:
Aunt Tabby looked pleased. She rubbed her painty hands all down the front of her dress and said, “Not too bad. I haven't lost my touch. What do you think, Araminta?”
I didn't say what I thought, as it would not have been polite. Also I was thinking hard. I
badly needed a PlanâAunt Tabby was not going to get away with this. So while Aunt Tabby went indoors to shout at the boiler, I thought about my Plan. It didn't take long before I had one. Soon the sign said:
Simple.