The Haunting of Heck House (10 page)

“Boy, the Hecklestone kids have got a pretty sweet set-up here, don'tcha think?” Cheryl said.

She looked over to see Tweed inspecting the black lace trim on a particularly gothic-looking gown and Cheryl could tell that she was moments away from drooling or trying it on.

“Oh, yeah.” Tweed sighed longingly.

“Well, I guess once Mr. H gets the family settled in Wiggins, they'll probably get homeschooled or shipped overseas to some kinda schmancy boarding school …”

Cheryl wandered a few steps farther into the dressing room.

Over along one wall stood three identical full-length mirrors, ornately framed and tall enough to double as doors. In the twilight gloom, she could see that, marring the polished surface of each looking glass—at varying heights and of varying, but all rather smallish, sizes— there was a handprint.

“Guess it's the maid's day off,” she said dryly, and reached out with the hem of her shirt to wipe away one of the prints.

Only … it seemed as if the handprint was on the
inside
of the mirror. She scrubbed at it, but it remained indelible. Cheryl pushed her glasses up her nose and peered closely at the smudge …

WHAM!!

“What the—?!” Cheryl jumped back, startled, as a hand, fitting the size of the print, suddenly slammed up against the mirror! Or so it seemed … Cheryl blinked and rubbed at her eyes and looked again. There was nothing there. She ran to the other mirror and thought she could see a figure, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, pressed up against the other side of the glass. “Who the—?!” In the third mirror, she thought she saw the flash of shiny black shoes running past. “Where the—?!”

“What's wrong?” Tweed called from over by the rack of sumptuous dresses.

“Hit the lights!” Cheryl called and heard Tweed instantly scramble around, looking for a wall switch or pull chain. When she found it, there was a loud CLICK and the ornate overhead fixture glowed to orangey-yellow life.

“What is it?” Tweed asked, rushing over to see what had startled her cousin.

Cheryl peered closely at the mirror. And then the one beside it. And then the one beside that. Nothing. Not even the handprints she thought she'd seen. “Uh … nothing …” She shook her head. “I guess.”

A gloomy silence shrouded the house. And then …

Giggling.

“D'you—”

“Shh!” Tweed silenced her cousin and pushed her hair back from her ear, cocking her head and listening.
In answer to Cheryl's unasked question, yes—she clearly heard it, too. The sound of mocking laughter, echoing and distorted, drifted through the house. But the owners of those voices were nowhere to be seen.

The girls stepped out into the corridor and tiptoed back to the main hallway, where the three corridors branched off.

After a moment …

“That way!” Cheryl whispered, pointing down one of the corridors. The girls took off at a silent run. Tweed took the doors on the left side and Cheryl took the ones on the right. There seemed to be dozens of them— almost as if the corridor was growing longer the farther down it they went—but eventually they reached the end. After much turning and jiggling of knobs and peering through darkened keyholes, all the girls learned was that they were all locked. They shared a perplexed moment at the end of the hall and then turned to retrace their steps … only to see that all the doors—every single one of them—now stood wide open.

“What the …?” Cheryl blinked and did a double take.

“Interesting,” Tweed said.

“I'd bet our hourly sitter rate—snacks included— that Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi are behind this.” Cheryl glowered at the shadows painting the hallway in stripes of gloom.

“You think?” Tweed was skeptical. “Isn't trying to
crush us with a piano going just a little overboard? Even for those two?”

“You know, they're probably freaking out because we totally
owned
that Bottoms Boys' Birthday Bash gig,” Cheryl said. “We left them with a lotta cake on their faces. I'm pretty sure they're not going to forgive us for that any time soon …”

“Yeah, but … a
piano
?”

“Harsh, I know. But what else could it be? Maybe they just meant to push it to the top of the stairs and lost control. But I think they're trying to rattle us out with these ‘spooky' shenanigans.” Cheryl put air quotes around the word
spooky
, just in case Cindy and Hazel were around somewhere, spying on them and operating under the false impression that she and Tweed were the least bit rattled. Because they weren't. At all. Not one bit. No siree—

SLAM!!

The door nearest them slammed shut with a resounding
crack
like a thunderclap and the girls nearly leaped out of their skins and took off down the corridor to the main hall! As they ran, the doors on either side swung closed one after the other— SLAM!!SLAM!!SLAM!!SLAM!!SLAM!!—all the way along. Except for the very last door. Even after they'd made it past, back to the landing at the top of the stairs, it still stood widely …
weirdly ...
open.

 

7
A
ROOM
WITH A
BOO!

C
heryl and Tweed exchanged a glance and, communicating through their exclusive series of custom hand signals, agreed to investigate. They backtracked toward the door—crouching low and using the tall dusty vases and hall tables spaced along the walls as cover—and approached with extreme caution. First Tweed poked her head around the door frame, then Cheryl did.

“Okaaay …” Tweed said.

“All riiight …” Cheryl glanced around.

“There's, um, nothing here.”

“Nope. Nada.”

“Okay, so … what's the deal? Why is this door open? This room's mostly empty.”

It was indeed. Furnishings in the room were
sparse—a large oak desk stood at the far end of the room facing a marble fireplace, paired with a wingback leather swivel chair. Nearby stood a small round table, draped in a cloth and surrounded by simple wooden chairs. An elaborate crystal chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling, right above a wide open space that looked as though it should have been furnished, but wasn't. One wall was occupied by tall French doors draped in long white curtains that stirred slightly in a breeze coming from … somewhere. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the other walls, but the bookshelves were empty. Not so much as a dime-store paperback rested on them.

The girls stepped over the threshold into the room, eyes sweeping the corners as if there was definitely something—or someone—hiding there, in plain sight.

“Maybe this was the room the piano came from,” Tweed suggested, waving at the empty expanse.

Cheryl shrugged and took a step farther into the room. When nothing leaped out to attack her, she took another one. Her footsteps were muffled by the thickly woven area rug that resembled a giant chessboard, and only the creak of the floorboards beneath indicated her movement.

“Cool rug,” she murmured, balancing on one foot on a black space, her eyes crossing as she stared at the alternating black and white squares.

“Rug? What rug?” Simon the speaker's voice came
from the depths of Cheryl's knapsack, loud and crackling and frantic. “Wait! Stop! Both of you. I know you told me to be quiet but you have to trust me on this one—
don't
take another step!”

The twins froze—not really because Simon had instructed them to do so, but more because he'd startled them half out of their wits. Still balancing precariously on one foot (she was afraid to put the other one back on the floor after such a dire warning), Cheryl shrugged out of one knapsack strap and reached around into the bag. She pulled the speaker out and frowned at it. The red Spirit Stone was pulsing like a warning alarm.

“Turn me around so I can see the rug.”

“Um, okay … Er, turn you which way now?” Cheryl fumbled a bit with the speaker.

“Point me at the floor,” Simon said in an exasperated tone. “My turban stone. Point the jewel in the direction I need to look.”

Cheryl did as she was told, with a silent Tweed looking on in fascination. The red gleam of the Spirit Stone swept the rug beneath Cheryl's feet like the beam from a crimson-bulbed searchlight. After a few moments, it stopped and seemed to narrow its focus on a spot on the far side of the room. “Aha!”

“Aha?” Tweed asked.

“I knew it. It's an old stage magician's trick.”

“What is?”

“The pattern of the rug is designed to confuse
the eye,” Simon said. “And camouflage the trap door beneath.”

“Holy moly! Trap door?” Cheryl handed the speaker over to Tweed, who kept it trained on the corner of the room, and pulled out her trusty mini-golf putter—she'd had the thing for so long the rubber grip had shredded to pieces and fallen off, but she couldn't bear to part with the hole-in-one guarantee—and tapped the rug in front of her.

“Careful …” Tweed cautioned as Cheryl paced slowly forward. “Careful …”

Beneath the rug, the floor seemed solid enough … until she got to the spot where Simon Omar's crimson light shone brightest. Then there was a hollow-sounding
THUNK
. Cheryl dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled slowly forward, sweeping the palms of her hands over the surface of the carpet as she went.

And … there it was! A seam in the carpet, hidden by the pattern, just as Simon said it would be. She worked the ends of her fingernails under the close-fitting fibres and peeled back the edge of a square of the rug. A square that covered a hinged wooden door. The slightest pressure on the surface of the trap and the thing collapsed inward. It snapped back into place, completely invisible to the naked eye, after a few seconds.

Tweed gasped. “Anyone unlucky enough to step on that square of floor would drop into who
knows
what kind of fiendish trap!”

“A tiger cage!” Simon suggested with gruesome enthusiasm. “Or a dungeon! Or a pit lined with sharpened stakes! Or—”

“Or maybe it's just a plain old laundry chute,” Cheryl said.

“Well, where's the fun in that?” the speaker grumbled.

Cheryl snorted. “Since when are dungeons fun?”

Tweed spun Simon around so that she was looking him in the face. Sort of. “If you're really a
real
magician,” she asked suspiciously, “then how come you know all about cheap tricks like trap doors and stuff?”

“What? Oh. Um. Well, uh, yes,” the departed mystic stammered. “My competition, you see! Uh …
they
were the ones resorting to chicanery and sleight of hand.”

“While
you
were the one performing real feats of supernatural derring-do, huh?” Tweed raised an eyebrow.

“Exactly!”

“And your final act?” Cheryl said, stepping carefully around the trap door and rejoining her cousin on the other side of the room. “The ‘mystical ka-boom'?”

“That's right! That's what it was. An ectoplasmic conflagration born of a catastrophic mystical convergence.”

“Not, say, too much black powder in a flash pot?” Cheryl suggested.

“What do you take me for?” Simon protested haughtily. “A charlatan?”

It was a bit disconcerting the way the speaker almost seemed to exhibit facial expressions. Tweed handed it back
to Cheryl and wandered over to the empty bookshelves next to the door. They were coated with a thick layer of dust, but there were also bare patches where rows of books had clearly stood. Recently. She peered closely and discovered a smattering of fingerprints in the dust, too. Made by small hands. She was about to call Cheryl's attention to them when suddenly, the leather desk chair at the far end of the room creaked.

Cheryl and Tweed froze.

In the silence that descended on the room, they could hear a thin, thready whisper of sound. Like faraway music. As quietly as she could, Tweed stuffed Simon in her knapsack so that she could have both hands free in case emergency hand-to-hand combat was required. Then together, she and Cheryl crept silently toward the other end of the room. The chair was one of those expensive, richly upholstered numbers with the high backs—a perfect perch for an evil villain to spin around on and reveal himself as the mastermind of some nefarious plot …

Well. The twins had seen enough movies to know that you didn't want a guy like that to get the upper hand. So, instead of waiting for some kind of dramatic reveal, they crept stealthily up behind the chair, ready to give it a good hearty spin. Once in position, Cheryl held up her hand and did a silent three-count with her fingers.

“
One … two … thr
—”

“Wait!”
Tweed mouthed, grey eyes wide.

“
What?
” Cheryl mouthed back.

“Are we doing one … two …
go-on-three
?” Tweed asked in a sub-whisper. “Or one … two …
three-and-then-go
?”

The age-old dilemma.

Cheryl frowned. “
Uh …
”

Too late! The chair suddenly spun around.

“GAH!!” the girls yelped in tandem and leaped back as the ominous hidden figure revealed himself to be … a fellow babysitter. Wearing headphones—the source of the ghostly music the girls had heard—and playing a video game on a tiny handheld screen.

“Hey, guys!” Karl Wu peeled off his shiny red headphones and bounced up out of the impressive leather chair. “What's shakin'? You two got that crazy invite, too, huh?”

“Er … yeah,” Cheryl said, composing herself after the near heart failure and glancing sideways at Tweed. “Yeah, we did.”

“And we're
totally
allowed to be here,” Tweed said, returning Cheryl's glance.

“Awesome!” he said. “I thought I was the only one here in this stupid old house and, lemme tell you, the boredom was kicking in big time!”