Scaredy Kat (2 page)

I ducked back through our front door, then in full junior spy mode I peeked through the window to get a better look at my
possible future neighbor. Using the camera’s zoom lens as makeshift binoculars, I was able to inspect him more closely. He
had the kind of face that didn’t give away his age—I guessed maybe he was in his forties, but he could have been younger or
older. He had shaggy black hair with gray mixed in—what my mom called a salt-and-pepper look. His forehead was creased with
lines, and his eyebrows furrowed as he stared at the house like he was looking for something.

Weird. I watched him through the viewfinder until I started to feel uncomfortably like a stalker. Almost without thinking,
I pressed the shutter button and snapped his photograph before lowering the camera. If he
was
in fact our new neighbor, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. He didn’t look like the type to barbecue in the backyard. He
looked way too intense for that. But I guess you never know. Anyway, for all I knew he was some kind of architect or birdwatcher
or simply your run of the mill nutjob.

Comforting.

I finished up out back in our yard, where my mother was still conducting her earthworm convention. She had also planted half
the orange symphonies, and I listened to her humming to herself as I captured a final few images of the house, then climbed
onto my trampoline to lounge.

“Figured it out yet?” my mother asked me, standing back to admire the flowers while brushing dirt from her jeans.

At first I thought she meant the face in the window, which kind of freaked me out. Of all the psychic abilities my mother
possessed, thankfully mind reading had never been on the list. Then I realized with relief that she was referring to the camera.
Nobody wants a mind-reading mom. Nobody.

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, crawling out the little opening in the trampoline’s netted safety enclosure and hopping down
onto the grass. “I got the upload thingy to work, so I can finally get pictures onto the computer. And I’ve been playing with
the zoom lens and everything. It’s a great camera. I’m going to use it for my basic communications project.”

“Really? You picked a topic?”

I nodded, and gestured toward the old house.

“I’m going to tell the story of that house in words and photographs,” I explained.

My mother looked across the fence at the house. She was silent for a few moments, her eyes half closed.

“Mmm,” she said. “Yeah. You should come up with some great stuff there.”

I wasn’t sure if that meant she had sensed something, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to get into the habit of running to
my mom every time I saw a spirit. Since it was apparently going to be happening on a very regu-lar basis, I needed to start
working on devel-oping my own instincts.

“Well, I’m going to go take a shower,” she said, giving me a smile. “I feel like a potato that’s just been dug up.”

I held up the camera.

“I’m going to go to my room and upload these,” I said. “Might as well get schoolwork done while Jac’s still away.”

“Oh, Kat, I’m sorry,” my mom said. “You don’t have much to distract you, what with me in the garden and Jac away. Not much
of a vacation. I should have planned something for us to do.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m actually kind of enjoying this photography thing.”

She gave me one of her intent looks, like she was trying to figure something out.

“Good,” she said, brushing my hair out of my eyes. Then she walked up the little brick path that led to our back door. Before
going inside, I noticed her glance up at the house next door.

It made me wonder. Had she seen the face, too?

Before taking the memory card from my camera, I took one last picture—this one was of me with my tongue out. I’d send it to
Jac, for a laugh.

The pictures obediently appeared on my screen in miniature form, one after the other. I clicked through them, one at a time.
Nothing. The photographs were interesting in their own way, but the phantom face didn’t appear in any of them, at least not
that I could see. I sat back in my chair, arms folded, and scowled at the screen. Why would the boy show up in just one picture?
I clicked on the e-mail icon so that I wouldn’t have to keep looking at the little images lined up on the screen like tiny
Tarot cards. I e-mailed my tongue-sticking-out picture to Jac without examining it closely—I didn’t really need to know all
the facial imperfections my high-tech digital camera could pick up.

At that point, I should have just let the issue of the boy’s face go. The ghost at school had come to me—had worked to get
my attention. This one was playing hard to get. Maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe my camera had captured him unaware. It
shouldn’t matter. I was coming to know that the world was full of ghosts, every hallway and staircase a potential portal to
another dimension. I had chanced upon a face looking out of the window of an empty house. Now it was gone. I should just leave
it at that.

But I couldn’t.

I could hear the shower running. I walked down the hall to the bathroom, opened the door a crack, and called that I was going
out for a little walk. A technical truth.

I went downstairs and into the living room to retrieve my shoes. From his doggie bed, Max, my German Shepherd, raised his
head and stared at me with huge brown eyes. His expression seemed concerned and slightly disapproving.

“Don’t look at me that way,” I said to him. “It’s no big deal.”

Max gave a knowing, weary sigh, and lowered his head back onto his paws. He continued to watch me as I laced my sneakers.
In a house where people could see the dead, get messages from the underworld, and commune with plant life, it didn’t seem
all that strange that Max seemed to know what I was about to do. Psychic German Shepherd. It would make a great reality show.
Or a very good reason to lock me up in the nuthouse.

I walked out of the living room without looking back at Max. I felt guilty enough about not being entirely truthful with my
mother—I didn’t need Max’s Disney Eyes making me feel even worse. Anyway, I wasn’t really going to do anything all that wrong.
I was working on a school project. There was no one living in the house. I was just going over to get some closer shots. It
was all innocent enough.

And if a door or window happened to be unlocked, what was the harm in having one little peek inside?

Our backyard was separated from the yard next door by an old stone wall that I easily climbed over; my camera hung around
my neck. Standing there, it was like I’d tumbled into another world. Nothing had been touched in this yard for several years.
The grass came to my waist, and vines had crept up an old swing set and twined around its poles as if they intended to swallow
it whole. The paint on the house was peeling off in large chunks, and the steps to the screened-in porch looked like they
might be rotted. Our house and garden looked strange from this viewpoint—it was like peering back through the wardrobe from
Narnia and catching a glimpse of the room back home.

I was making my way carefully through the tangle of plant growth toward the back porch when my foot connected with something.
I reached down and felt for it with my hand, my fingers touching something small and metal. I picked it up. It was a little
armored vehicle, about the size of an old Hot Wheels car, army green with a white star. I turned it over in my hands, then
without really thinking about it, I stuck it in my sweatshirt pocket.

The steps leading to the porch were much more solid than they looked. The porch door was locked, but since the screen already
had a huge hole in it, I just reached through and unlocked the door from the inside. There was nothing on the porch itself,
except for an old set of wind chimes hanging from above. They were tangled, and I reached up and unknotted them so they would
swing free again. I’ve always loved the sound of wind chimes.

The door from the porch into the house was locked, but a window on the same wall was open. It was a much bigger leap of faith
to climb through the window than it had been to unlatch the broken screen door, but something within me was determined to
get inside the house. I threw one leg over the windowsill, ducked my head, and hoisted myself through.

I was standing in a kitchen. The air smelled stale and a little sour, but unlike the outside of the house, the kitchen was
in pretty good shape and neat as a pin other than some dust and cobwebs. The wooden cupboards and shelves were painted a cheerful
avocado green, and the linoleum floor was scrubbed clean. A small table and two chairs were the only furniture there. On the
other side of the kitchen, I could see another room, and a narrow hallway beyond it. I crossed the kitchen and went through
the doorway.

Probably the dining room,
I thought. Like the kitchen, it was dusty but otherwise neat and in perfect condition. The hardwood floors were smooth and
creaked slightly under my feet. The sun shone in windowpane squares across the floral wallpaper. I was suddenly enveloped
by the smell of baking bread, as strong as if I had just walked into the local pastry shop. I turned and looked back toward
the empty kitchen, which looked bright and inviting in the late afternoon sun. Strange. The house looked so rundown and creepy
on the outside. But from inside, it was perfect.

The aroma of bread now powerfully scented the air, and though it was a comforting and familiar smell, my heart started beating
harder. I had never picked up a ghost smell before.

The hallway passed a stairway to the right and led to the front door. At the end of the hall were rooms to the left and the
right, and there was another little doorway under the stairs. It reminded me of the closet Harry Potter lived in at the Dursleys.
I opened the door and peered inside to find a little, neatly appointed bathroom.

I reached the end of the hall, and turned through the door on the left, into a sitting room. I barely had time to register
the fact that there was a fire burning in the fireplace when the sound of a piercing scream froze me in my tracks.

I instinctively whirled around to look behind me, though the scream had come from inside the sitting room. When I turned back,
the ghost fire was gone and the fireplace dark.

I waited, cautiously, to see if anything else was going to happen. This medium business could leave a person’s nerves totally
shot. Sometimes I felt like I was in one of those suspense movies where the audience can always see who’s creeping up, but
the person in the movie is totally oblivious. At least in the movies the music gets all weird when something unexpected is
about to happen. I could use a soundtrack of my own. Standing in the silence waiting for a noise or a smell or a glimpse of
something was making me absolutely nuts.

Another scream rang through the air, but now that I was listening so closely, it sounded more like a playful scream. Like
somebody was being tickled or something. I relaxed slightly, until my eye caught movement from the corner of the room. A small
ball was rolling toward me. It stopped precisely at my feet. Maybe it was an invitation to play, but I had no intention of
accepting it. I took a picture of the room, and another one of the ball. Then I heard footsteps overhead. Was there no end
to the supernatural activity in this house?

Someone was up there. Not a little boy, but someone much heavier. A man, maybe. Alive? Or not? There was absolutely no way
for me to know. I went to the bottom of the stairs and tried the front door. It was locked. I heard a thud from upstairs,
and my heart began thumping in my chest. I couldn’t stand that I was so afraid, and that I couldn’t control those feelings.
What was the point, I wondered for the hundredth time, of being gifted with spirit sight when half of the time the very glimpse
of a ghost freaked me out half to death? I hated that about myself. It was like being a fisherman who was afraid of the water,
or a weatherman afraid of lightning.

And if I fled the house now, that would only make it worse. I took a deep breath and started up the staircase, clutching the
banister a lot more tightly than I needed to. The stairs led to a rectangular landing with three doors. The sound had come
from the room at the front of the house, facing the street. I tried to focus on something cheerful as I walked down the hall,
and settled on an image of Max’s face. My mother had said something once about certain types of spirits who could sense fear
and drew their energy from it. I didn’t want to be the Red Bull fueling some crazy spirit with a surge of power.