The Haunting of Heck House (8 page)

She LEAPS out of the way, as the sword whistles over her head!! The two do BATTLE!

WARRIOR TEE

(over her shoulder as she fights)

Hey! You're quoting Little Orphan Annie! Wrong movie!

She points to where a pair of GIANT-SIZED DINOSAUR-LIKE CREATURES AWKWARDLY LURCH TOWARD THEM. The creatures HISS and SCREECH. They BRISTLE with GIANT SPIKY SCALES. The WARRIORS are cut off from the TEMPLE.

The reptiles lumber in pursuit ... but are distracted by the sudden appearance of a GIANT VENOMOUS TOAD!!

The monsters FIGHT!

The WARRIORS dodge between them.

WARRIOR TEE dive-rolls over the spiky, swishing tail of one of the reptiles.

WARRIOR CEE ducks and runs straight through -- BETWEEN THE FRONT LEGS OF ONE OF THE CREATURES!

They
almost
reach the temple steps ... Suddenly, WARRIOR TEE points to the skies with her sword!

WARRIOR TEE blinks at her companion.

OVERHEAD CAMERA shot frames the WARRIORS as the SHADOWS OF GIANT BAT-WINGED CREATURES SWEEP OVER THEM. They bound up the TEMPLE steps ...

Right into the STICKY TRAP OF A GIANT SPIDERWEB, STRUNG FROM PILLAR TO PILLAR.

They untangle themselves. WARRIOR TEE is paler than usual. WARRIOR CEE is all fired up. Her eyes narrow and she points her sword at something over WARRIOR TEE's shoulder.

CAMERA CLOSE-UP ON: WARRIOR TEE's eyes –- saucer-wide beneath the brim of her helmet.

CAMERA WIDENS OUT to show a GIANT HAIRY SPIDER LEG, POISED TO TAP WARRIOR TEE on the SHOULDER.

Cheryl gaped at her cousin, as Tweed gyrated across the porch in a dance of sheer, flappy panic, screeching “CUT!! CUUUTTT!! Yikes! Cut!”

“Whoa! Tweed!” Cheryl lunged for her and grabbed her by the shoulders before she toppled off the porch and into the shrubbery. “TWEED! While-O-Wait, partner! While-O-Wait!”

Tweed froze, compelled by the power of the W-O-W chant. Her hands were clenched into fists in front of her, and her eyes were squinched tight. “Get it off!” she squeaked. “Getitoff getitoff getitoff … GET IT OFF!”

“Er … okay …” Cheryl assumed she meant the itty-bitty spider that was sideways-creeping across the top of her head, and so she reached up and gently plucked the wee thing from Tweed's dark hair and carried it over to the porch railing, shooing the bug from her palm with a breath of air. “Scoot,” she said and waited until the spider had scuttled out of sight. Then she turned back to her cousin, trying her best not to stare in shocked surprise at Tweed's monumental freak-out.

“Is it gone?” Tweed asked, cracking open one eye.

“It's gone.”

She opened the other eye and a blush of embarrassment crept up to displace the normal pallor of her cheeks.

“So.” Cheryl cleared her throat. “Spiders?”

“It's true. I'm arachnophobic.”

“I just thought you were afraid of spiders.”

“That's what that means.”

“Oh. Right. I just—”

“I looked it up.” Tweed kicked at the surface of the porch with the toe of her black, many-buckled boot. “It's embarrassing. I'm supposed to treasure the macabre, revel in the creepy, delight in the freaky-outy. You know. Things exactly like, well, spiders.”

Cheryl shook her head, somewhat astonished that she'd never known this about her cousin. The girls had always just taken it for granted that they knew everything about each other. But as close as they were—as close as if they were actually twins with each other—they didn't.

“I never would have guessed,” she said.

Tweed winced. “You won't tell anyone, will you?”

“Heck, no.”

“If this got out to the general populosity, it would totally destroy my spooky street cred.”

Cheryl put a hand on Tweed's shoulder, casually removing a second little bitty spider that was harmlessly perched there, without drawing Tweed's attention to what she was doing. “Your secret's safe with me, pal. Nice to know we can still surprise each other,” she said, nonchalantly depositing the bug on a branch out of Tweed's line of sight.

“Thanks, pal.”

 

6
OPERATION: DING DONG

‘‘O
kay, then,” Tweed said as she squared her shoulders and turned to face the door of the house. “Enough excitement. Ring that bell!”

“Right!” Cheryl turned to the door of the house and raised a hand, one finger extended. Then she paused and looked around. “Huh.”

“What is it?” Tweed asked. “Not another spider?”

“Oh no, nothing like that.” Her gaze swept the frame surrounding the door. “Just that … there's no doorbell.”

“Huh.” Tweed peered closely, confirming the absence of buzzer or bell.

Cheryl frowned. “Does this mean we have to change the mission name?”

“I say keep it.” Tweed shrugged. “I like ‘Operation:
Ding Dong.' We'll just say it's ironic. Besides, ‘Operation: Knockers' might give people the wrong idea.”

“Right.” Cheryl nodded. “Okay. So … what do we do now?”

For some reason, both the girls were still feeling somewhat reluctant, even after their bout of ACTION!! Now that they were really there, standing on the threshold of the old manor house, Cheryl glanced nervously at the sky. She knew that her imagination was a pure and potent force to be reckoned with, but even she had been surprised by how real their ACTION!! game had felt. Especially when the winged shadows had swept over them. She'd actually thought she'd felt a chill.

But that wasn't the real reason for her reluctance.

“What if ol' Heckenwhozits sends us away?” she asked. “I mean, we are kinda crashing this party. The invite specifically said—”

“I know what it said!” Tweed said, rather more snappishly than she intended. She took a breath. “Sorry. I mean, I know what it says, but we're here to convince him we're up for the job, right? And we are, right? We can do this?”

Cheryl had never really heard her cousin sound unsure of herself before. The spider encounter must have shaken her up more than she would admit. “Of course we are,” Cheryl said firmly. “And of course we can.”

She gave Tweed the C+T Secret Signal (patent
pending). Tweed grinned, some of the usual grimly gleeful sparkle returning to her eyes. She gave Cheryl the Signal back, turned toward the door, lifted her fist … and lowered it again.

“Knock,” she said to Cheryl.

“You knock,” Cheryl said back.

Tweed's mouth disappeared in a thin line. “Okay, Fine. I'll … um …”

“Just get on with it already!” Simon Omar's voice startled them both.

Frankly, both girls had quite forgotten he was there.

“You're killing me with all this suspense!” he continued. “No, wait … I'm bored. So bored. You're boring
holes
in me!”

Cheryl reached into the mesh side pocket of her knapsack and brought the speaker up to her face. “Now listen here, Speaker Boy, we'll run this mission how we see fit. We don't need some exploded old-timey Ouija-board substitute giving us orders.”

The speaker started making noises that sounded distinctly like a chicken clucking. Cheryl and Tweed exchanged a glance. Maybe having spent all those years trapped in a gaudy bauble and unable to communicate had damaged the ex-magician's sanity.

“Bo-ock … bock-bock-bock-bock …”

Or maybe Simon Omar was just calling them chicken.

“Hey!” Cheryl exclaimed upon the realization.

Tweed grabbed the speaker from Cheryl and held it out toward the enormous, heavy-looking oak front door. It looked like something transplanted from a medieval castle. It had heavy bronze hinges on one side and a large, ornate bronze doorknob right in the middle of the carved wooden surface. It was strange … the hinges were dull with tarnish, but the doorknob seemed almost to glow, as if it had been recently polished.

“You wanna get this show on the road so bad?” she said, glowering her best gothy glower. “
You
knock!”

“No knuckles,” the speaker pointed out.

Tweed ground her teeth together audibly and went to shove the speaker back in the bag.

“Wait!” Simon exclaimed. “All right, all right. I'll put my lack of money where my lack of mouth is. Go ahead—bash me on the door, why don't you, and … uh … now, hang on just a minute …” The red glow from his “eye” stone swept the door from side to side and stopped, focusing into a narrow beam, aimed at the big bronze doorknob. “Hey! I know that knob—”

Suddenly, the door swung open, and the twins jumped a foot in the air. Cheryl hastily grabbed Simon back from Tweed, stuffed the squawking speaker into the main pocket of the knapsack and yanked the drawstring tight, silencing the wacky mystic's protests. It wouldn't do to show up unannounced at the Hecklestone manor
both underaged—according to the snooty invite—and lugging along a mouthy disembodied magician in a metal box. That was sure to make them unwelcome.

The girls peered into the yawning maw of the house but all they could see, beyond the glow from the porch light that lit up only a few feet of Persian carpet, was shadow-shrouded darkness.

“Um … hello?” Cheryl called out. She cleared her throat to try and rid her voice of a wobbly quaver. “Mr. Hecker—”

“Hecklestone,” Tweed hissed.

“Right. Mr. Frecklestone?”