The Haunting of Heck House (17 page)

Hazel Polizzi owned a professional lock-pick kit.

And she'd just used it to spring Cindy from her trunk.

Cheryl and Tweed stood there, open-mouthed.

“What?” Hazel shrugged nonchalantly. “Tools of the trade.”

The twins exchanged a glance. How come
they
didn't have lock picks?

“Binky Barker is one of my regular sitter gigs,” Hazel continued airily. “There isn't a room, car, cupboard or suitcase that kid hasn't locked herself into at one time or another. I travel equipped.”

“Nice work,” Tweed said, wide-eyed.

“Really nice.” Cheryl nodded in agreement, a bit stunned.

It seemed now as though the sitter challenge really might be a real thing. And their rival had just seriously one-upped them. It was an uncomfortable sensation for the girls. If there was one thing they'd always had absolute faith in—beyond the truths conveyed to them by their beloved movies—it was their sitter skills. Even when the rest of the town seemed to go for the flashy, the fashionable, the ever-so-teeny-bit-older-than-them, they'd known in their hearts that they were the superior choice. But now … lock picks?
Real
ones? Cheryl might have pretended once, during an espionage-themed ACTION!! sequence, to use a pair of chopsticks to pick a lock, but …

“I ordered it off the internet,” Hazel said, rolling up the kit and stuffing it into a pocket in her purse.

Feedback nodded knowingly.

“The only reason I couldn't pick us out of this stupid basement is because I couldn't find the stupid door!” She sniffed.

Suddenly the girls felt terribly uncertain. And … young. Maybe they weren't the town's best sitters. Maybe thirteen
was
the magic age. Tweed and Cheryl exchanged uneasy glances as Artie rushed forward to offer Cindy a hand. But she shrugged away from him and climbed
unsteadily to her feet unassisted, the breath heaving in and out of her lungs. She threw her hair back over her shoulders and looked like she might launch into a serious tirade for a moment, but then there was another sudden sound that made them all jump.

Thumpthump … thumpthumpthump … thump.

The thumpthumpthumping seemed to be coming from inside the walls.

“Oh, man,” Feedback muttered. “What
now
?”

Cheryl and Tweed shook themselves from their moment of doubt and stepped forward, hauling out putter and Nerf dart-gun respectively. Pilot slid his new monkey wrench out of his overalls loop. Artie hefted the heavy leather book that had so effectively knocked
him
for a loop. Together, they took up defensive stances, shoulder to shoulder.

The other three sitters readily let them—none of them really having much experience in hand-to-hand combat—and waited for the next episode of weirdness to unfold. A tense silence descended on the subterranean laboratory. And then the wall made a noise that sounded like “MMrggwrgl?”

Artie elbowed Pilot and the twins aside and trotted up to lean against one of the walls, his ear pressed to the panelling.

“Mrgwllr?” he gurgled back. “Shack, buddy? That you? I was wondering where you'd got to …”

“What is that little nutcase doing?” Hazel asked, clearly not having succumbed to the charms of Artie's wardrobe makeover in the same way that Cindy had.

“GRrrwlrgggm …?” Artie murmured, ignoring her. “Is there a trip lever? A latch or a button or something?”

“Art-Bart?” Pilot asked. “What are you—”

“It's Ramshackle!” Artie explained. “He's in the wall. He's been part of this house since it was built—er, y'know, before it exploded—”

“Before it
what
?” Hazel asked, baffled.

“—and he probably knows every nook and cranny and super-secret passageway!”

“Of which there seem to be
way
too many, if you ask me!” Feedback exclaimed. “Seriously! Who builds a place like this? What's wrong with using the front hall stairs?!”

Artie gargled a few more questions in Gargoyle and turned back to the others. “I asked him to see if he can open the passage for us …”

“Who's Ramshackle?” Hazel asked, suspicious.

“A friend,” Cheryl said before anyone could blurt out the exact species of that “friend.” She somehow didn't think Hazel and Cindy would buy
that
story. “He's going to help us.”

“I told you—we don't need your help!” Cindy glared mutinously.

In that instant, a section of wall panelling slid aside, revealing another spiral staircase leading upward. Tweed
turned to Cindy, who wore an expression of blank astonishment on her face.

“Okay, then,” she said with a small, grimly satisfied smile. “I guess we'll just be shutting this here hidden passageway behind us when we go and you can find your own.”

“No!” Hazel cried. “Wait!”

“C'mon!” Artie exclaimed, bounding up the stairs two at a time.

The others followed hastily in his wake, just in case the wall decided to slide shut again. The top of the hidden staircase exited out through the front of a big old grandfather clock. Artie pushed open the false face of the timepiece and stepped into the living room/study, whispering to Ramshackle to strike a pose on the ornate mantel of the fireplace—where a pale-flamed fire now burned—and not move.

Cindy and Hazel came out next, having pushed past Cheryl and Tweed on the narrow spiral stair in their rush to escape the lab. As Cindy passed the fireplace, she looked up to see the gargoyle, doing his best impression of his stony daylight persona. She pulled a sour face and muttered, “What a creepy statue!”

Pilot was the last one up. He immediately started checking all the windows in the room. The big oak door in the marble foyer beyond was doubtless still locked but maybe one of the study windows would be open. No such luck. They were all latched tight,
painted shut, and utterly unbudgeable. The fire burning in the fireplace discouraged trying to shimmy up the chimney—especially when it flared dramatically, hissing and popping like a living thing as Pilot approached the hearth.

“You know,” he said with a sigh, “as much as I hate to advocate the destruction of personal property, I say we're gonna have to try to break a wind—”

“That's it! Outta my way!!” Cheryl bellowed as she tore past him, brandishing the heavy iron poker from the fireplace high over her head. “I've had enough of this hokey-pokey!”

“Does she mean
hocus-pocus
?” Feedback asked.

“Let her go, pal,” Artie said. “She's on a roll.”

Cheryl brought the poker crashing down onto the window glass—only to have it bounce right off!

“That's quality Victorian manor house window glass there, missy,” Simon whispered at her from his concealment. “They don't make 'em like that anymore.”

It was true. The pane was so thick its surface was rippled and hard to see through. But she hadn't even cracked it!

“Plus it's probably reinforced with ectoplasmic residue,” he continued. “This whole house was reconstituted from nothing but a doorknob, remember. There's some pretty hefty mystic might that went into creating this place, and those windows are no exception.
I mean, I'm sure it makes for lower heating bills come the winter and all but—”

“I don't care!” Cheryl howled in frustration. “I don't plan on still being here in the winter! I don't plan on still being here in the
morning
!”

She bashed at the window a dozen more times but it was no use. In the silence that followed, the fire crackled with a sound like grim chuckling.

“Hey …” Feedback said, looking around. “Where are the other sitters?”

Cheryl and Tweed looked around. “They didn't fall through another trap door, did they?” Cheryl asked, not particularly upset by the prospect.

“Cindy?” Artie called. “Hazel?”

Silence.

Followed by the sound of a key turning in a heavy lock.

It came from the foyer of the house.

Cheryl and Tweed exchanged a glance and then ran for the grand front foyer, the boys hot on their heels. They were just in time to see Hazel, a fistful of lock picks clutched tightly in one hand, throw her arms up in the air in triumph.

“Yes!” Cindy pushed her out of the way and heaved open the door.

Scrambling over top of each other in their haste, the pair lurched over the threshold and out onto the
porch—just as the enormous bronze doorknob began to glow to angry life! Cindy and Hazel screamed in fright, and over their panicked cries, the others heard the ghostly wailing sounds of the Hecklestone Trio of Terror crying out. But then the roar of a gale-force wind blotted out the cacophony of voices as it came boiling down the chimney flue and burst out of the gaping maw of the living-room fireplace like an invisible freight train. It rushed past, almost bowling the bunch of them over, and slammed the front door shut again!

With Cindy Tyson and Hazel Polizzi on the outside.

The doorknob was pulsing with furious spectral energy in glow-stick hues of goblin green, and when the sound of the lock tumbling back into place boomed through the house, it blazed like a beacon and then went dark. The keyhole glared like the empty eye socket in a skull and the twins knew, even without trying it, that the door would be locked up tight as a bank vault again.

The girls ran to the window on one side of the big oak door and looked out. The boys ran to the other. Out on the porch, Cindy and Hazel stood gasping, wild-eyed and crazy-haired.

“Hey! You guys can't just leave us here!” Feedback shouted.

“Yes, we can!” Hazel said, her voice muffled by the thick Victorian ecto-windows. “I
quit
this stupid contest! You win, you buncha cheater weirdos! And you can tell
Old Man Hecklestone we've got better things to do than to house-sit his creepy old mansion, anyway.”

“Wait!” Artie pressed his hands up against the window beside the front door. “Cindy! I thought we had the start of a beautiful friendship!”

In the darkness lit only by the glow of the flickering porch lamp, Cindy's expression wavered for a brief moment. Then she shook her head, and through the thick glass, they heard her say, “Sorry, handsome! I'm looking out for number one! We're getting out of here. Good luck finding the fridge!”

Then she grabbed Hazel by the arm and dragged her off the porch, and the two of them tore down the path like a pack of ghouls was nipping at their heels.

“Huh …” Artie turned away from the window after they disappeared and Pilot put a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Dames.” Artie snorted. “Right, Armbruster?”

“Right, Art-Bart.” Pilot sighed wearily and wandered over to sit on the bottom step of the staircase. “Can't live with 'em.”

“That's it?” Cheryl blinked, stunned by the suddenness of their rivals' departure. “We won?”

Tweed stared out the window with a faraway gaze, watching as the running shapes of Cindy and Hazel grew small in the distance at the end of the front yard path. “I guess we did,” she said wonderingly. “I mean … it doesn't
feel
like winning …”

“No,” Feedback said. “It kinda really doesn't.”

“Can you guys please just forget about that stupid contest for a minute?” Pilot huffed in frustration. “Even if it was a real thing and not just something to lure you all here—which, hel
lo
, it clearly
was
—you're all taking this matter of ‘professional sitter pride' just a little too far!”

“I never thought I'd say this,” Cheryl said, “but, Pilot, you're right.”

“You never thought you'd say I was right?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No. About us taking our sitter business too seriously.” She sighed. “Clearly Cindy and Hazel
do
have skills. And so do you, Feedback. We're not the only game in town. We shouldn't be.”

“I didn't quite mean it like that, Cher-bear,” Pilot said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Of course you should take your business seriously. You're good at it—
great
at it—and you should be proud. What I meant was I think we need fewer super-sitters and more monster-mashers just at the moment!”

“Speaking as one of the aforementioned super-sitters,” Feedback said, raising his hand, “I'll second that motion!”

The tension eased for a moment as the twins shook themselves out of their brief slump. One thing was for sure: the absence of Cindy Tyson and Hazel
Polizzi sure made things a whole lot quieter around the house.

Until Simon suddenly piped up brightly, saying, “Well, I'd say that was rather a lucky stroke of luck, eh, wot?”

“What was?” Cheryl asked, digging him out of the pocket of her knapsack.

“Getting that front door open like that.”

“No it wasn't! We're still stuck here.”

“Oh, no,” the speaker explained. “Not for you. I meant, that was rather a stroke of luck for those girls. I mean,
they
timed it just right.”

“They did?”

“Sure!” he said. “You probably distracted the house with your window bashing just long enough for them to jimmy open that door and escape. Doubt they would have managed it otherwise.”

“Wait.” Tweed put up a hand. “You think the
house
has a … a what? A personality? Awareness?”

“Is that even possible?” Pilot asked. “I mean, do you
really
think an inanimate object can have a personality?” The speaker seemed to glare at him until Pilot realized what he'd just said. “Oh. Uh, sorry. No offence …”

“I'd say it's a definite possibility,” Simon said after another moment of silent glaring and a haughty sniff. “There was probably an enormous amount of ectoplasm soaked up by this house back in the day, what with
Hecklestone's experiments and seances and whatnot. Now, in the wake of
your
Egyptian-princess rescue, the resulting mystical ka-boom not only gave the house the power to reconstruct itself, it's also allowed it to take on a spectral life of its own.”