The Haunting of Heck House (6 page)

Tweed put the magnifying glass down slowly.

Cheryl stepped back away from the work table. She looked over to where the carnival ride sign stood leaning against the wall. “It's just like that!” She pointed, her lip quivering a bit. “It's like we're not tall enough. We're not old enough? We're the best dang babysitters this town has ever seen. AND we saved the town! This? This is a grave injustice and no mistake about it! I mean, y'know, except for the fact that it's clearly a mistake!”

There was a rebellious gleam in Tweed's grey eyes. “I don't see why we don't just go anyway.” Her quiet voice, a counterpoint to Cheryl's more boisterous outrage, was still sharp with emotion.

“Well, why not?” Cheryl jumped right on board that bandwagon. “Why don't we? And prove to this
whole town
and
His Lordship Heckenfrankenfurter, or whatever his name is, that we are the best. Thirteen or not thirteen!”

“Whoa, whoa,
whoa
!” Pilot exclaimed, alarmed by the head of steam that was gathering between the two of them. “You girls really haven't thought this through. I mean—for one thing—d'you honestly think Pops is going to let you two out for a whole night in a strange house? He probably wouldn't let you, even if you
were
thirteen!”

The girls exchanged a mutinous glance and Pilot shook his head in exasperation.

“Aw, c'mon!” he said. “It sounds like a whole buncha fuss for nothing. And you don't want to hang out with them anyway—”

“Them?” Cheryl asked pointedly.

“Oh, uh, yeah …” Pilot huffed a heavy sigh and rolled his eyes heavenward, figuring out just how badly Cheryl and Tweed were going to take the news. “I kinda heard Hazel Polizzi talking to Cindy Tyson about the stupid thing this morning. They were hanging out around the ice cream shop when I went to the hardware store to pick up some WD-40 and this new monkey wrench.” He plucked the wrench out of the denim loop in his overalls and twirled it on his finger like a gunslinger.

Tweed's gaze narrowed. “What were they saying?”

“That they were going to corner the Wiggins sitter market …” he said, “baby, pet
and
house—the whole kids and kaboodles!—after they aced the contest.”

Tweed ground her teeth and Cheryl snorted in barely suppressed fury.

“They seemed pretty pleased with themselves.” Pilot shook his head, an expression of distaste on his face. “Laughing pretty hysterically—joking about all the flyers they'd delivered around town
really
paying off.”

“Flyers!?” Cheryl sputtered in outrage. “But … but … that's
our
marketing strategy!”

Tweed's gaze smouldered with displeasure and her mouth disappeared into a thin line. “Clearly, our success at the Bottoms Boys' Birthday Bash made an impact on the competition. They've decided to play by the rules in the handbook of dirty tricks.”

“No … girls.” Pilot grimaced. “I don't think that's what they meant.”

“What
did
they mean?” Cheryl frowned.

“I think they were making fun of
your
flyers.”

“Oh.”

“I don't know why you girls are so bothered by it.” Pilot shook his head. “And I can't believe their mothers would let them go either. So the whole situation is whaddayacallit. Moot.”

“Oooh no! There's nothing moot about this!” Cheryl's outrage had her lit up like a firecracker. “Whatever that
even means! Unless it means outright war! Then it's super-mooty.”

“C'mon, girls. Don't you think there's something just a bit shady about this?” Pilot plucked up the invitation and gave it a narrow-eyed glare.

“Pff.” Cheryl waved away his concerns. “Don't be naïve, Flyboy. That invitation is
embossed
. You can't be shady if you're embossing stuff.”

“It's true,” Tweed agreed. “Shadiness would be indicated only if the invitation was handwritten in red ink that far too closely resembled blood.”

“Right! Don't you know anything?” Cheryl crossed her arms over her chest. “Besides, it could be a terrific business opportunity!”

“A high-profile gig like this could really set us up.” Tweed nodded. “Think of the publicity.”

Pilot shook his head. “I just don't—”

“You can come with us if you're so worried!” Cheryl said.

“No.”

“But—”

“But nothing!” Pilot slashed a hand through the air. “I'm
not
coming with you because you're
not
going! Listen. We got off darn lucky last time you two got yourselves in hot water. Imagine what would have happened if Artie had stayed a lizard!”

Tweed rolled an eye. “Crocodile.”

“Whatever!” Pilot said, exasperated. “Or if Pops had
found out you two had been driving the Moviemobile around town. Or if my mom had woken up to find me and my plane gone in the middle of the night! We'd all have been grounded until were old and grey!”

A silence descended in the barn in the wake of Pilot's outburst. Clearly he felt pretty strongly about the subject at hand. Cheryl blinked a few times and then nudged Tweed with her elbow. The cousins exchanged a glance and Tweed turned back to Pilot.

“You know something, Pilot?” she said solemnly. “You're right. We don't have anything to prove, do we Cheryl?”

“Uh … no?” Cheryl tentatively agreed.

“Well, good,” Pilot said, picking up his wrench and sliding it back into its pocket loop. “I better go. My mom needs me to do some chores, and so Pops and me are gonna knock off the repairs until later today. It oughta be easier to test out the projector around sundown, anyway. We should have that screen up and running by the time the cars start rolling through the gates tonight, in time to deal with all that overflow from another smash-hit top-notch C+T bill. That's something to take your minds off this house-sitting nonsense, right?”

“Right.”

“Sure.”

Pilot tipped his hat back, tossed the girls a casual wave and said, “Later 'gators!” Then he was gone.

Cheryl turned and tilted her head at Tweed. “Nothing to prove?”

“One thing to prove.”

“And that is?”

“That we're the best dang sitters this town has got!”

 

4
DIAL S
FOR
SITTERS

S
undown seemed like a long way away on a summer day as long and sunny and hot as that one. But there was an awful lot to be done if the twins were going to successfully execute OPERATION: DING DONG. First, the girls had to go and tidy the Drive-In lot and pack away all of their ACTION!! gear. Next, they had to gather up all the sitter implements that they thought they might need for a night on the job. In spite of all their claims to expertise, the girls had never before really sat at a house with no actual living, breathing occupants in it, and so they were somewhat unsure as to what tools of the trade they should pack. For instance, the bag of Double Stuf Oreos they usually considered indispensable as incentives—bribes, really—toward good behaviour amongst their toddler charges would be less than useful
in a big old empty house that was free of actual children. And besides, the girls would just wind up eating them all themselves.

In spite of what they'd said to Pilot, Cheryl and Tweed knew perfectly well that he was right about one thing. Talk turned to the fact that there was, in all likelihood, no way in the world that their grandfather was about to sign off on them spending a whole night in a strange house. They discussed several ways to get around that particular roadblock.

“Just don't tell him!” Simon the speaker suddenly piped up with the most obvious solution, from inside his drawer.

“Gah!” Cheryl jumped at the sudden crackle of sound. She stalked over to the work table and yanked open the drawer. “Where the blazes were you when Pilot was here?”

“Um.”

“You made us look like weirdos, y'know,” Tweed said, glaring down at the little metal box. “And that's something we're quite capable of doing all on our own. We don't need your help!”

“Sorry,” Simon said. “I'm shy.”

“You're a bucket of bolts and wires,” Cheryl pointed out. “You can't be shy.”

“I was … napping.”

Tweed didn't buy it. “Were not.”

“You
told
me to be quiet!”

“And then we
told
you to say something,” Cheryl said. “You're kinda lousy at taking direction.”

“Look. I'm not sure that I'm ready for the world to know about me,” the speaker said. “I mean, except for
you
fine young ladies, of course. What if the constabulary finds out? Or those mad fiends in the scientific institutes? They'll want to take me apart to see what makes me tick! Your friend with the monkey wrench there was going to do that very thing!”

“How come you're talking to us, then?” Tweed asked.

“I like you two. Lots of pluck.”

“Whatever.” Cheryl rolled her eyes and shut the drawer. “Come on, Tweed.”

“Wait!” Simon's muffled voice protested. “Take me with you!”

Tweed wasn't so sure that was a good idea. “Uh …”

“Why?” Cheryl asked, pulling the work table drawer back open a crack and peering into its dim confines.

“I, well, it's rather embarrassing,” the speaker muttered. “After all, I, the Great Simon Omar, have faced the abyss. I have parted the veils between the worlds of the living and the dead. I have summoned forth the ethereal and the terrible, communed with the spirit plane, dazzled and amazed and—”

“And you're afraid of the dark, right?” Tweed asked pointedly.

“Erm … yes.”

Cheryl stifled a snort of amusement. But to be fair,
she didn't much care for sleeping in a room without a night light either.

“Beyond that,” Simon continued in a rush, “you're going to need me.”

“Need you?” Cheryl asked. “For what?”

“Your house-sitting competition!” he said. “Just think of the kind of advantage a man—er, machine—of my particular qualifications could provide!”

“Well,” she mused, “we've already branched out into cat-sitting and, if we manage to book this gig”— she waved the invitation—“house-sitting as well. Speaker-sitting could be just another speciality of C+T Enterprises, I suppose.”

“Okay then.” Tweed plucked the mystically possessed speaker up out of the drawer and tucked him into the side mesh pocket of Cheryl's knapsack where he could look out and—if it was actually something he needed to do—breathe. “But we're taking you with us on one condition. You have to stay quiet unless we tell you to talk. People in Wiggins already think we're weird enough without us having to explain the likes of you!”

“Deal,” the speaker said. “Done.”

“Okay.” Tweed nodded.

“I'll be hushed as a mouse.”

“Good.”

“Not a peep out of me. Not one magic word.”

“Fine.”

“Mum. Dumb. Silent as the grave.”

“I get it.”

“Dead quiet.”

Tweed sighed.

“Not a whisper of a—”

“Zip it, Speakie!” Cheryl finally exclaimed.

Simon Omar crackled with a burst of static in surprise and then lapsed into silence.

“Geesh,” she said. “For a speaker, he sure talks a lot.”

Tweed knit her brows together in a frown beneath her bangs. “Are we
seriously
not going to tell Pops about this?” she asked.

“If we do, there won't be any ‘this.' He won't let us go.”

“It's not fair. Hazel and Cindy are almost the same age as us. And they didn't just save the town from a supernatural incursion. We did that.”

“Sure.” Cheryl shrugged. “
You
know that and
I
know that and, well,
that's
kind of the problem. It's not like we can tell anyone. Aside from Artie and Pilot, that intel stays classified. Eyes Only. Not only would no one believe us, but they'd think we were funny-farm material. Even more than they already do.”

“Pops would believe us,” Tweed muttered.

Pops, they'd always known,
didn't
think the girls were crazy.

“Maybe …”

“He'd believe us and then he'd ground us.”

“Yup.” Cheryl felt the sudden rush of a blooming rebellious streak. “But it's not like this is going to be the same thing. It's just a big ol' pile of non-paranormal bricks. No kids and no craziness, right? And it's not as if we haven't already proven ourselves in the arena of super-sitting! We can totally handle ourselves.”

“Sure we can.”

“Sure you can!”

“Gah!” Cheryl almost jumped out of her skin yet again. She nudged the speaker in her knapsack sharply with her elbow. “Shh!”

“I told you! I can be useful. Let me prove it.”

“How?”

“I've got an idea. A way you two can convince your granddad to let you off the leash for the night.”