Ghost Invasion (4 page)

That was as far as it went. He’d have to do a new chapter now, all about Carson’s visit to the loft and how he flipped absolutely out of his skull over the bats. Ari grinned, thinking about how Carson had been walking around staring up at the bats and had almost fallen down the hay chute right on top of Ari. He would have, too, if Ari hadn’t whispered, “Hay chute, Carson. Look out for the hay chute.”

And then they’d had this weird conversation with Carson lying on his stomach with his head hanging over the edge of the chute. A conversation that was mostly about bats until Ari remembered to tell Carson that Web wanted him to help with his atmosphere studies. “He needs someone to help with his balloon and stuff like that,” he told Carson. “And you know what? I’ll bet if you help Web he’ll think of some way to help you get a bat for your collection. He’ll probably think up some new bat-catching invention. You know how Web is.” Just about then they heard Kate and Aurora coming up the ladder. Ari just had time enough to get Carson to promise not to give away his secret observation post.

Carson had kept his promise. Ari grinned, remembering how Carson had only raved about bats when Kate and Aurora asked him all those questions. And how they had finally seemed to believe that the voices they’d heard were just Carson talking to the bats. Which was pretty amazing, actually, because usually Aurora was pretty hard to fool.

It was just about then that Ari noticed how late it was getting and remembered dinner was going to be early that night because Nick and Diane were going out. At the Pappases’ no one cared too much if you weren’t on time to dinner. But if you weren’t, there might not be anything left to eat. Jumping up, he stuffed his notebook back into his fanny pack and ran for the ladder.

It wasn’t until he was getting ready for bed that night that he noticed his notebook was not in the pack. His first thought was that maybe he’d been robbed, but then he realized that he must have forgotten to zip up the pack when he’d left the barn in such a hurry. The notebook must have fallen out somewhere between the barn and his house. It was a scary thought. There was a lot of stuff in that notebook that he didn’t want anybody to read.

Fortunately there wasn’t anything in the notebook about his hay chute observation post. Ari had better sense than to write exposes about his own secrets. But there was a whole lot of stuff about Kate and Aurora and ghosts. The kind of stuff that would be certain to give Kate an excuse to use him for karate practice. The way she said she would if she ever caught him spying on them again.

A minute later, after finding his flashlight and pulling on a jacket over his pajamas, Ari tiptoed down the hall and peeked into the living room. Aurora was curled up in the beanbag chair, reading, and Athena was lying on her stomach in the middle of the floor, printing her name over and over again on a little scrap of paper.

No problem. Aurora never noticed anything when she was reading, and nothing could disturb Athena when she was practicing her writing. So far the only letters she knew how to write were the ones in her name, but she practiced them all the time and all over everything. Ari’s father, Nicholas Pappas the sculptor, liked to tell visitors not to sit still too long, because if you did Athena would write her name on you. With Aurora reading and Athena writing, Ari tiptoed right through the middle of the room and nobody noticed a thing.

It was a very dark night. There were lights on in all the houses of Castle Court, but beyond the shining windows the dark was deep and still. Ari started down the sidewalk walking fast, shining his flashlight from side to side. He went all the way around the cul-de-sac and through the Andersons’ yard and partway through the forest without seeing any sign of the notebook.

Just outside the barn he stopped and thought—but not for long. It didn’t take long to decide that it might not be a good idea to go all alone into a haunted barn at night. He would, he decided, get up early in the morning and come back. Very early. All the way home he kept telling himself how he’d come back and find the notebook for sure. He was certain he could find it. But even so, he didn’t sleep very well that night.

A
RI WENT TO SLEEP
that night wondering frantically what could have happened to his notebook, but he didn’t come close to guessing. He didn’t even have a clue. Actually, the one clue that he really needed was the fact that Bucky Brockhurst had really clobbered one of Carlos Garcia’s best pitches that same afternoon.

Absolutely clobbered it. Unfortunately it didn’t help him to catch up with Eddy’s home-run record, because it happened to be a little bit foul. Well, actually quite a bit foul. But if it hadn’t been foul it would have been the longest home run that anyone had ever hit in Prince Field. In fact, the ball finally wound up a long way over the fence that separated Prince Field from the rest of the Andersons’ property. And when Bucky went to look for it he made a very interesting discovery.

What Bucky discovered, just at the edge of a bunch of biff old trees, was a small notebook. At first he just gave it a kick, but then something told him he’d better check it out.

The notebook turned out to be a real gold mine. It turned out to be something that gave him, Bucky Brockhurst, just what he’d been looking for ever since Kate Nicely had gotten away with threatening to karate chop him, way back in September when there’d been this argument about cutting down a few little trees. What Bucky had been looking for ever since was
revenge
, and that wimpy little Pappas nerd had just given him a great idea about how to get it.

That night Bucky reread all the stuff the nerd had written, particularly the page about how Kate and Aurora were going to go to the barn on Halloween night because they thought some ghosts were due to show up there.

Bucky chuckled. He was glad he wasn’t stupid enough to believe in that ghost junk. But what he did believe in was revenge. And the other PROs were going to help him get it. He threw down the notebook and went to call up Carlos and Eddy.

He called Carlos first. A few months ago it would have been Eddy, but not anymore. Eddy was getting to be a lot harder to get along with since he got to be the home-run king of Castle Court.

“Hey, Garcia,” he said when Carlos came to the phone. “Guess what? Old Karate Kate and her crazy buddy are planning to sneak away from the big trick-or-treat expedition and go ghost hunting. Isn’t that a riot?”

“Ghost hunting?” Carlos said. “Where?”

“In that old barn up on the hill behind the Andersons’ house. See, it looks like those dumb stooges have been hanging around there and they really believe there’s going to be some visiting ghosts on Halloween night.”

“You mean they think it’s haunted?” Carlos asked.

“Look, dude,” Bucky said, “it’s not really haunted. Remember, we went there once and it’s just an old, run-down, smelly wreck of a barn. You don’t believe in that haunted junk, do you? It’s just that those nerds
think
it is. So I thought maybe we’d just go along with the fun, okay? We’ll sneak off, too, and go up there and give them something to really believe in.”

“How are you going to do that?” Carlos asked.

“Not me! Us! You and me and Eddy. Okay?”

There was a long pause and then Carlos said, “Well, I don’t know. We’re all supposed to stay together the whole time. And Rafe and Gabe will be in charge, so if I took off they’d notice and—”

“Look, Garcia,” Bucky interrupted, “do you want to be on the A team or not?” It just so happened that Bucky Brockhurst, as the best athlete at Beaumont School, got to pick the people to be on his team for the interschool basketball competition. And it was really important to old Garcia to be on the best team. What with having a father and a big brother who were famous athletes, old Carlos had a real thing about proving he was a good athlete too.

After another pause Carlos said, “Yeah, okay, Brockhurst. What are we going to do?”

“Now you’re talking,” Bucky said. “I haven’t gotten it all worked out yet, but part of it is getting hold of the right costumes. You know, really gory junk. My dad knows this guy who sells costumes and masks. You know, the really awesome ones with fangs and warts and bloody eye sockets and all that great stuff. He was going to get me one, but I’ll have him get three of them. For all three of us PROs.”

“And then what?” Carlos said.

Actually Bucky hadn’t finished planning that either. “Well,” he said, “we’ll just sneak off. You know, right after we start off with the trick-or-treaters. We can just cut off from the group right after they start down Beaumont Avenue and climb up the hill. Then we can follow that old hill trail right around to the back of the Andersons’. And we’ll get to the barn before they do, and when they come in—Zowie! They want ghosts? We’ll give them ghosts.”

Carlos didn’t say anything.

“Okay?” Bucky asked. “Okay?”

“What does Eddy say about it?”

“Oh, I haven’t talked to him yet. I called you first because I knew you’d be up to it. I’m going to call Eddy now and he’ll be all for it, for sure.”

He’d better be
, Bucky was thinking as he hung up and dialed Eddy’s number. Because if he wasn’t, Bucky could start in again about getting tired of baseball and going back to playing basketball all the time. And old Short Eddy, who never could get a rebound or a jump ball with someone as tall as Bucky Brockhurst around, would really hate that.

Just as Bucky had thought, it wasn’t too hard to convince Eddy Wong that playing ghosts in the Andersons’ old barn was just what he wanted to do on Halloween night. He did bring up a couple of problems, though, ones that Bucky hadn’t quite thought about yet. Eddy could drive you crazy sometimes coming up with logical details like that, but this time it did kind of come in handy.

The first one was about the notebook. Eddy wanted to know how Bucky had found out about the girls’ plans, and when Bucky told him Eddy said, “What if Ari decides to tell them? I mean, what if he tells his sister about losing the notebook and what was in it? They might guess that somebody else had found out about their plans or something.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “They might.”

“Why don’t you put it back, like, where you found it. And then Ari won’t even know that—”

“Yeah. I’ll do that,” Bucky interrupted. “I was about to think of that. I’ll put it back where I found it, right away.”

The other detail Eddy came up with was even more important. “We’ll have to at least start out with the whole trick-or-treat bunch,” he said. “And if everybody sees us in our costumes Pappas and Nicely will know who we are right away when we show up at the barn.”

Bucky hated to admit it but Eddy was right again. For a minute he was stumped, but then he got an idea. “I know,” he said, “we can just dude up in some totally typical Halloween costumes. You know, pirates or tramps or something boring like that. Only we’ll have our other costumes stashed someplace. Like maybe in our pool house. And we can come back that way and—guess what.”

“Yeah,” Eddy said. “I can guess.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, ARI’S
alarm went off very early. Jumping out of bed before he was completely awake, he tripped on a shoe, fell over a chair, and wound up halfway across the room on his hands and knees. It hurt. Particularly the knee he’d whacked when he fell down the hay chute. But five minutes later he was on his way out the front door to look for his missing notebook.

He didn’t really expect it to be anywhere on the cul-de-sac’s circular sidewalk or in the Andersons’ yard, since he’d already checked those places the night before. But he kept his eyes open, just in case he could have missed it in the dark with only a flashlight. Then, just before he got to the grove of trees that surrounded the old barn, there it was, right where it must have landed when it bounced out of his fanny pack.

Ari had never been so glad to see anything in his whole life. Grabbing up the notebook and stuffing it inside his jacket, he ran for home. He was almost to his own yard when he saw Carson Nicely trudging across the court toward him. He’d never seen Carson outdoors so early in the morning before. Or any of the Nicely kids, for that matter. Breakfast at the Nicelys’ was at seven o’clock and nobody went anywhere before that.

“Hey, Carson,” he said. “Where’re you going?”

Carson looked startled. He stared at Ari and then he glanced back over his shoulder toward his own house. “My mom doesn’t know,” he said.

“Yeah. I’d kind of guessed as much.”

Carson kept on going so Ari went with him. He didn’t have to worry about being back in time for breakfast. Breakfast at the Pappases’ was sort of every man for himself. That was because artists, like Nick and Diane, tended to sleep late. So everyone got up when they wanted to and ate anything they wanted to. Anything they knew how to fix, that is. On school mornings Ari and Aurora usually just had cold cereal. But Athena, who liked to eat late and have a big breakfast, liked French toast. Athena had been making French toast since she was three years old.

Since Carson didn’t seem to have anything more to say, Ari tried the question again. “Where you going, Carson?”

“I have to try something on,” Carson said. “At Web’s house.”

“Try something on?” For a minute Ari didn’t get it, but then he thought he did. “Oh, you mean like something for Halloween?”

“Umm.” Carson nodded. “For Halloween.”

A minute later, when they turned into the Wongs’ driveway, Web was just coming out onto the back deck dragging a whole bunch of leather straps behind him. Some of the straps looked like big old leather belts, but there seemed to be a couple of dog leashes too.

“Wow,” Ari said. “What’s with all the leather straps? Some new kind of scientific experiment?”

Web looked at Ari suspiciously.

“Hey,” Ari said. “I won’t tell anybody. I know how to keep a secret. You couldn’t even
count
how many secrets I haven’t told.” Suddenly remembering he was talking to a dude who could probably count to a godzillion, Ari added, “Well, most people couldn’t, anyway.”

Web stared at Ari a minute longer before he said, “Okay. I guess you mean it. Come here, Carson.” Then he untangled a few more straps and started wrapping them around Carson like some kind of a harness. One of the straps went around Carson’s waist, and two more went around his chest and then up over his shoulders.