Dunc and the Flaming Ghost (5 page)

It had been dusty where Amos was sitting with Dunc and Eddie before, but now, under the shelf, the dust was so thick, it felt to Amos like a pillow under his head. As he tried to brush it away, he glanced back into the corner.

And almost swallowed his tongue.

Two livid green eyes were staring at him.

Big eyes.

A fang beast
, Amos thought.
An escaped fang beast
.

He tried to stand up. He forgot he was
under the shelf. The sound of his head hitting wood echoed in his ears.

The footsteps stopped. “What was that?” Larry asked.

“What was what?”

“I just heard a noise.” One set of footsteps walked back toward the wine shelf.

The green eyes still stared at Amos. He saw a flash of light off something long and white.

Fangs.

It’s going to rip something off me
, Amos thought,
with those fangs. My fingers or my nose or my ears or …

“You’re hearing things,” Bill said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. I’m the boss, and I say you are. Let’s go.”

“But—”

“I said let’s go.”

Larry sighed. “All right, but I think—”

“Nobody cares what you think. Let’s go.” The footsteps moved away. Bill and Larry left and closed the door, still arguing.

 … or my chin or my throat
. Amos heard a snarl, then the eyes blinked and
disappeared into a hole in the wall. He scrambled out from beneath the shelf like a crab and grabbed Dunc’s arm.

“What’s the matter, Amos?”

“Fangs,” Amos shook Dunc. “Really, really big, huge, fanged monster—” He pointed back into the corner.

Dunc shined his flashlight under the shelf. “There’s nothing down there.”

“Are you sure?” Eddie moved two steps away from the corner.

Amos nodded. “I tell you I saw it. Right there.” He pointed.

“There’re a couple of old bottles under there. Maybe you saw the light reflecting off them.”

“Does light snarl?”

“No.”

“Then that isn’t what I saw.”

“There’s nothing there now.” Dunc shrugged. “We need to figure out how to get into the secret room.” He walked back around the wine shelf. Amos followed, watching for the fangs over his shoulder.

“Look,” Dunc said. “There’s water under
the faucet. There must be another valve. Help me find it.”

He crouched and tried to wiggle the faucet and pipe, but they didn’t move. He shined his flashlight up into Amos’s face.

“Amos, can you—” He stopped. “What’s that right next to your head?”

Amos looked. “It’s a bottle, just like the one on the other side of my head and the ones by my elbows.”

“It’s not the same. Look—it has finger-prints all over it.”

Amos tried to take the bottle off the shelf. It wouldn’t move. “It must be glued down. And there’s a hole in the bottom.”

Dunc came closer and examined it. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would it be that way?” He frowned. “Unless …”

“Unless what?” Amos asked, but Dunc ignored him. He turned to Eddie.

“Do you have any drinking water here?”

“Upstairs, in a canteen.”

“Can you get it?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I don’t want to say until I know if I’m right.”

“I’ll be right back.” Eddie ran up the cellar stairs. A minute later, he came back down with a canteen in his hand.

“Good,” Dunc said. He took the canteen and poured the water into the bottle. It drained down the hole out of sight, and a second later they heard a click. The wooden wall swung slightly toward them.

Amos stared at him. “How did you know that would work?”

“I didn’t, but I read an article in the library about something called a water-activated latching mechanism. There’s a hidden tube in the wall attached to a lock system. The weight of the water on top of a plate trips the latch. Afterward you have to drain the water off.” He reached down and turned the faucet handle. Water gushed out onto the floor. “They used them before electricity to lock secret doors, like this one.” He pulled at the door. “Let’s see what’s on the other side.”

“I already know what’s on the other side,” Amos said. “They’re big, with long fangs and green eyes, and they want to take parts of my body off.”

But he was speaking to himself. Dunc had already gone through with Eddie behind him. Amos waited. When he didn’t hear any ripping sounds or screams of pain, he followed.

Inside was a row of cages with a big, black weasellike animal in each one. Their fur was thick, and their tails were long and bushy.

“I’ve heard about these,” Dunc said. “These are Russian sables.”

“Sables?” Eddie asked. “Like in coats?”

“Exactly. They’re so valuable and rare, the Russian government won’t let them be exported out of the country. Larry and Bill must be sable smugglers.”

“They look so cute,” Amos said. “Say, you don’t suppose that’s what I saw? The fangs? They don’t look so dangerous.” He put his finger to one of the cages. The sable made a spit-hissing sound and hit the end of the finger like a buzz saw.

“Ow!” He hugged his almost-devoured finger to his chest.

“So what do we do now?” Eddie asked.

“I guess we go to the authorities. We’ll tell them—”

The click of the lock on the outside of the basement door stopped him.

“They’re back.” Amos tried to whisper, but it came out a squeak. “The smablers. I mean, the snuggles.…”

The door opened before he could say more, before they could run or even move, and the three were caught flat-footed standing in the room with the sables by Bill and Larry.

•
11

“What’s going on here?” Bill demanded.

Nobody replied.

“When I tell you to run,” Dunc whispered in Amos’s ear, “run.”

“Where to?” Amos asked, but Dunc didn’t answer him. Instead he snapped off his flashlight.

“Run.”

Larry was reaching for Amos just as the darkness closed down. There was one moment, one part of a second, when everything seemed to stop, to hang in the air.

Then the world went insane.

The tiny room exploded silently in a
green-blue light that seemed to come from inside everybody, shooting beams out of Larry’s eyes and mouth, out of Dunc’s ears and bouncing off the walls, into and out of the cages and sables, whipping back and forth and getting brighter and brighter until everything—people, walls, floor, everything—glowed and flowed.

“What …?”

Small things moved around the room, flying, zipping back and forth. They were tiny, and when one of them stopped on Amos’s shoulder, he turned to see a little fat person sitting there, not four inches high. It was dressed in a little pirate suit and carrying a little pirate sword, and it grinned and jumped at Larry and was gone before Amos really knew it was there.

With other small figures it flew through the green light, around and around, unhooking all the cages and letting the sables loose, unbuttoning and unzipping the clothes on Bill and Larry so their pants dropped around their ankles. The sables exploded from the cages and were soon running
around the room chasing the little zipping people.

All in seconds, tiny seconds.

“I don’t like this,” Larry said, as if by looking at his face no one could see that.

“I had an uncle once,” Amos started, “who, before he overdosed, used to talk about things like this in the sixties …” It was as far as he got.

The green light and all the little people vanished. It was dark for only a moment.

“
Who disturbs my sleep?
”

A new white flashing, searing light tore the room apart. Standing next to them, over them, towering so his head hit the ceiling, was Blackbeard.

There were matches in his hair, in his ears, under his hat; his eyes were on fire, burning deep and intensely red. When he opened his mouth, flames shot out and streamed toward Larry and Bill.

“
Burn
,” Blackbeard cried, a cry from all the dead who ever were. “
You will burn forever
.”

He waved an arm, and when it came up Amos—who felt as if he had turned inside
out—saw that the hand held a cutlass with a blade of fire.

It cut through Larry and Bill and seemed to slice them in half. It threw them back out of the small room into the main part of the cellar and dumped them by the door in a heap.

Then it was over.

The room was again dark, totally dark.

“Dunc?” Amos squeaked. “Are you there?”

Silence.

“Dunc?
Dunc?
”

“Over here.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m trying to get the light to work.” He thumped it against his leg, and a flashlight beam filled the room.

Larry and Bill were still on the floor in the other room. The sables were tearing around, in and out of the open door.

“What happened?” Eddie asked.

“Dunc—” Amos squeaked.

“Come on,” Dunc said. “We have to tie those two up before they come around.”

“Dunc—” Amos squeaked again.

“What?”

“I peed my pants.”

Dunc looked at him. “Jeez, no kidding. What have you been doing, saving it up for a week?”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. Sometimes even brave people pee their pants when they’re frightened.”

“Aren’t you scared?” Amos asked. “Didn’t you see all that?”

“Sure. But we still have to tie them up, then get the cops.”

“It was ghosts,” Amos said. He swallowed loudly. “It was a whole bunch of ghosts, and one of them sat on my shoulder, and Dunc, you don’t even seem to care.”

“Sure I care. But let’s tie these two guys up before they cause trouble, then get the cops. Then we can talk.”

Amos still hadn’t moved. Dunc found some electrical cord and tied Larry and Bill hands to feet, and then back to back together, and Amos still hadn’t moved.

“It was Blackbeard,” he said. “He was
ten feet tall, and he had a sword a mile long.”

Dunc came back. He took Amos by the hand and led him out into the main part of the cellar. “Yeah, it was Blackbeard.”

Amos looked at Bill and Larry as if he were seeing them for the first time.

“Their hair is white.”

Dunc nodded.

“Even their eyebrows.”

“They were kind of scared. Now let’s get the police.”

“Blackbeard could have done the same thing to us,” Amos said.

“But he didn’t. He—” Dunc stopped, looking suddenly at Eddie. “Eddie, your feet are sunk into the floor.”

Eddie looked down. “Oops.” Without appearing to move, he floated up a few inches. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

Dunc stuttered. “You—”

Eddie sighed. “It just gets so
tiring
having to scare people away all the time. I wanted someone else to do it for a change. When I saw you wouldn’t be able to, I had to do something.”

“Eddie,” Amos said. “Eddie the teacher. Edward Teach.” He swallowed. “B-B-B-B …”

He stopped, caught his breath, and tried again. “B-B-B-B …”

“Blackbeard,” Dunc completed for him. He took a step backward. “Why aren’t Amos and I scared stiff like these two are?”

“I didn’t slice you with this.” Eddie took a four-foot flaming sword out from behind his back. “And I don’t want to. I do have a treasure to guard, though, and you are in my house. So if you don’t mind—” He waved the sword once through the air.

“Enough said.” Dunc took Amos by the arm. “We’re on our way out.”

“Have the police come pick these two up, if you don’t mind,” Eddie said.

“No problem.”

“B-B-B-B …” Amos repeated. He was too frightened to move.

Dunc finally had to open the basement door and push Amos out—his feet leaving skid marks in the dust—before he could run next door and call the police.

•
12

Amos sat on the end of Dunc’s bed and rubbed his leg. “I almost broke it this time.”

“What happened?” Dunc was working on a scale model of a diplodocus. He was painting the skin to match the color on the box the model came in.

“It’s because of Eddie,” Amos said.

“But Eddie made you famous—at least for a day.”

“I just wish the TV people had delayed the interview until after I had changed my pants.”