House of a Thousand Screams (5 page)

Freddy's voice was small. “What do we do now?”

“Now?” I began sweeping the flour into a pile. “Now we finish making the kitchen as good as new.”

“I meant after that,” Freddy said.

I knew what he meant. But part of me couldn't believe what I was about to say. I took a deep breath. “All right. After that we find out where this poltergeist thing is hiding. Then we figure out a way to fix its little wagon.”

“Are you serious?” Freddy squeaked. “Jill, poltergeists are supernatural. They have powers.”

Poor Freddy! He looked so scared that I forgot my own fear. I had to make him feel better.

“So what?” I demanded. “We have powers too!”

“We do?” Freddy looked doubtful. “Like what?”

“Well . . .” I thought fast. “Uh—we're from Texas. It's like they say back home. Don't mess with Texas!”

Freddy was staring at me as if I had sprouted an extra nose.

I hurried on. “Texans are the roughest, toughest, smartest people around. Right?”

“If you say so,” Freddy answered, still staring at me.

But I was starting to get into it. “You bet I do. Remember the Alamo!” I called, and punched my fist into the air.

“We lost at the Alamo,” Freddy reminded me.

Oh, yeah, I thought. Well . . .

“It doesn't matter,” I argued. “It's the Alamo spirit that matters. The Texas spirit. Where everything is bigger and better.” I was really worked up by now. “What state's bigger than Texas?”

“Alaska.”

I shook my head. Freddy wasn't catching my drift. “Alaska doesn't count.”

“In fact,” Freddy went on as if I hadn't spoken, “if you cut Alaska in half and made it two states, Texas would be the
third
biggest state.”

“You are getting to be a major drag,” I told him. “The point is, we're not quitters. Would Sam Houston quit?”

“No. He wouldn't.”

“Would Davy Crockett quit? Would Jim Bowie quit?”

“They weren't Texans,” Freddy objected.

“Okay, forget about them.” I leaned forward. Time to pull out the big guns.
“Would the Dallas Cowboys quit?”

Freddy's face lit up.

“The Dallas Cowboys! No way! They would never quit.”

“And neither will we!” I grinned at my little brother. “Now, come on. We have a lot left to do before we can go hunting for that poltergeist.”

We tore into the mess with a new spirit. As we cleaned, I thought about our plan of attack.

If a poltergeist was hiding out in the house, there
was only one place it could be. The one place Mom hadn't gotten around to organizing yet. The one place I'd carefully avoided ever since we moved in.

The spookiest, scariest room in the house.

The attic.

But were we brave enough to go up there?

B
efore we did anything, I took a shower. I had to wash all the flour paste out of my hair. It wasn't easy.

Then Freddy and I tiptoed past Mom and Dad's room, where Mom lay, “resting.”

“Shhh,” I warned.

We climbed the narrow stairs and stopped at the attic door. Freddy whispered, “What do we do if we find it?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “But we have to do
something.
Maybe we could chase it out a window.”

“Or spray it with bug spray,” Freddy suggested.

I nodded. “Whatever it takes. I just can't handle another day like today.”

My hair was still wet from the shower. Water dripped down my neck. It reminded me of the disaster
in the kitchen. That made me mad all over again. I set my jaw and turned the knob.

Thick, musty air greeted us as we stepped into the attic. The shutters had slats that sifted the late afternoon sunlight. Tiger stripes of light and shadow lay over mysterious mounds of stuff.

I stepped forward quickly and pulled the string for the light. A bare bulb flickered on.

It wasn't so creepy with the extra light. The room was cluttered with Uncle Solly's old junk. Boxes lay everywhere. A rocking chair with a broken rail leaned in one corner, more boxes piled on its seat. A dress dummy draped in rotting fabric stood beside it. That must have belonged to Uncle Solly's wife, I guessed. She died years ago, before I was born.

“I don't see any poltergeist,” Freddy said. “Do you?”

“No,” I admitted. Now that we were there, I felt kind of stupid. What had I expected? That the thing would be sitting at a table playing solitaire?

Freddy ran a finger along one of the old boxes. “Wow. Uncle Solly sure had a lot of stuff, huh?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And look at the dust and cobwebs. Nobody's been up here for a long time.”

Freddy shifted a box from the top of a stack. He opened the top and looked in.

“Hey, look at this.” He held up a book. “It's all about coin magic. And here's a book by Houdini! Cool! It's like a library of magic.”

Freddy loves magic books. He doesn't have too many of his own because they're really expensive. So this box was like a treasure chest to him.

“This is great!” he said, beaming.

We could be here for a while,
I thought. I opened another box. Inside were hundreds of fancy silk scarves. Some were plain. Others had designs that looked like magical symbols.

We found other things. Boxes filled with plastic thumbs and fingers. Hollow tubes with other tubes hidden inside them. Hats with secret compartments for storing rabbits. Old-fashioned ladies' bonnets—for what, I couldn't even guess. Also, Freddy got really excited over something he called an egg bag. I don't know. It just looked like an ordinary bag to me.

The attic was like a magician's museum. The more stuff we took down, the more stuff we found.

That's how we found the big tricks, the illusions. There was a kind of brace that Freddy said was used for making people look as if they were floating. He showed me how it worked. But there were some tricks that even he couldn't figure out.

“It's like I said before,” Freddy told me. “I think some of Uncle Solly's act was real magic. That's why we can't make it work.”

“Don't be dumb,” I said. “That's impossible.”

“Hah!” Freddy poked me in the side. “
I'm
not the one who wanted to come up here and search for a poltergeist.”

At last we found an old trunk buried under piles of boxes. We dragged it into the clear. Freddy lifted the lid. Inside was a bunch of old magazines. And a wooden box carved with ugly, grinning faces.

“Hey! That's the puppet box we saw in Uncle Solly's video,” I exclaimed.

I pulled the box from the trunk. It was about a foot long on each side, a perfect cube. And heavy for its size. I shook it. Something thumped inside.

The box had a broken latch at the top. A piece of wire was twisted through it to keep it closed.

“Open it,” Freddy suggested.

I started to untwist the wire. I'd almost gotten it off, when I heard a scraping noise behind me. And then a squeak.

“What was that?” Freddy whispered. “A rat?”

“A
rat!”
The hair rose on the back of my neck. I thought of the tiny footprints I'd found on my dresser top. I didn't want to turn around. What if the rat was right behind me?

Just then the puppet box jerked in my hands. “Hey!” I cried.

“Jill. Look!” Freddy gasped.

I whipped around.

There
was
something right behind me.

But it wasn't a rat.

It was much, much worse!

I
stared at the nightmare thing in front of me. My mouth opened and closed. But I couldn't manage to get my voice going.

The dressmaker's dummy! Somehow, it had come to life! It floated in the air. Drapes of rotting fabric spread from its form like bat wings. One of the ladies' bonnets floated above. Between the bonnet and the dress dummy, where a face should have been, there was—nothing. Just dark, empty space.

Then the dummy swooped down at me!

“Look out!” Freddy screamed.

I yelped and stumbled backward. The fabric shaped itself into tattered hands and wrapped around the box I was holding. It tried to pull the box from my hands!

I hung on, too scared to let go. I wanted to scream. But I couldn't breathe.

Freddy hammered at the dummy with his fists. “Leave my sister alone!” he yelled.

I made a last desperate pull to get away. The box slid out of my sweaty hands and I fell backward.

But the dress dummy's fabric hands couldn't hold on either. The box hit the floor with a clatter. The top sprang open. I heard a
whoosh
of air.

Above me, the lightbulb exploded in a shower of glass.

And then everything went quiet again.

The dress dummy stood by the chair, where it belonged. The fabric was just fabric. The bonnet lay on the floor.

I sat there, dazed. And scared.

And mad.

If the poltergeist was trying to scare us away, its little plan had just backfired. Big time.

No poltergeist was going to drive
me
out of our new house!

Freddy ran to me. “Are you all right?”

“I'll live. Thanks for trying to rescue me.” I grabbed his arm and pulled myself to my feet.

“Maybe we should get out of here, huh?” he asked hopefully.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We came up to find a poltergeist, right? Well, it's definitely here.”

“Right. We found it. So let's go, okay?” Freddy started toward the door.

“Would you hold on?” I demanded, grabbing his arm. “We have to figure out how to fight it. Maybe there's something up here that will show us how. Let's look around a little more, okay?”

Freddy swallowed. “Okay,” he agreed.

As he stepped toward me, his foot hit the box that the dummy and I fought over. Something small and shiny slid out and skidded a few inches along the floor.

“Hey.” Freddy bent down and picked up a pair of glasses. “These were in the box.” He handed them to me, then picked up the box. “Nothing else. The puppet isn't in here. Uncle Solly must have stuck him somewhere else.”

I examined the spectacles. They were old-fashioned. Wire rims framed narrow rectangular lenses. The lenses were super thick, like Coke-bottle bottoms.

I put them on.

I don't need glasses, so these should have made everything blurry for me. But I could see perfectly clearly.

I pulled them off again and studied them. They
looked
like ordinary thick glasses.

I slipped them on again. Nothing.

“They're just plain glass,” I said, surprised.

I handed them to Freddy. He took off his own and
slipped them on. “You're nuts. These are exactly the same prescription as my glasses!”

“No way!” I protested. Freddy has a heavy-duty prescription. Without his glasses he's pretty much a mole person—totally blind.

I took the glasses from him and tried them on again. They were clear as a windowpane. I could see perfectly.

How could they work for me
and
for Freddy? There was something very strange about these glasses.

Something moved at the edge of my vision. My heart thumped. I jerked my head around.

Nothing there.

Squinting, I studied the shadows along the wall.

“What's up?” Freddy whispered.

I held up my hand to keep him quiet.
There.
A shadow moved behind one of the boxes. I was sure of it.

“There's something there,” I whispered. “I can almost see it.”

Slowly, I moved sideways to get a better look.

And there he was.

He looked like a tiny man, but covered all over with woolly brown hair. He stood on little bow legs, like a hairy cowboy. He couldn't be more than six inches tall. His lips poked forward, pooching out into a tube, kind of like a straw. Little black eyes glinted above a flat nose.