Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary (7 page)

“Are you sure?”

I hobble around like I've just come home from a war. “Oh, yeah. Never felt better.”

She throws a pillow at me. “Stop that!”

“Ooooo! Getting serious now. We've advanced to pillow warfare!” I hurl it back at her. “Well, take that, you turncoat!”

She throws it at me again but hits Holly instead, and pretty soon the four of us are flinging pillows and sleeping bags and just basically pounding on each other. Finally, I get a sleeping bag over Marissa's head and roll her around, and after a minute of struggling to break free, she cries, “Surrender! I surrender!”

So I set Marissa free from her flannel prison, and we're all sprawled out on the floor laughing when we hear someone snicker.

We look over at the door, and standing there are two boys, older than us, but not much. The taller one's got a paper bag choked in one hand. He says, “Wow. Nice party,” and the other chimes in with, “Yeah. Looks like one of Bep and Anneke's.”

Dot snaps, “If you can't be nice, just mind your own business, all right?”

They take that as an invitation to come in. The taller one asks, “So who are your friends?”

Dot scowls at him, but then mutters, “Holly, Marissa, Sammy, meet my brothers, Stan and Troy.”

We all make little waving motions while we size each other up, then Stan chokes down his paper sack a bit more and gives us a little scowl. “I can't believe you're actually gonna sleep out here. I guess you're braver than I thought, Dot.
I
sure wouldn't sleep out here. Not with”—he waves a hand through the air—“you know.”

Dot hesitates, then shakes her head. “What are you talking about?”

Stan looks at all of us like, Uh-oh, and heads for the door. “Uh…never mind. I'm sure you'll sleep fine.”

“Stan!” Dot grabs his sleeve. “Quit trying to spook us!”

His voice drops and he says to Dot, “Sorry. Forget I said anything. I didn't know you didn't know.”

Dot's face crinkles up. “About
what?
”

He looks her straight in the eye and whispers, “About what happened in here.”

“
What
happened in here?”

“Some lady got trampled by a horse.” He looks up at the rafters. “Apparently she's still here.”

She lets go of his sleeve. “Oh, shut up! You're trying to tell us this place is haunted?”

“It's true. Ask anyone in the neighborhood.” He laughs. “Or just tell me about it in the morning.”

He and Troy head for the door, but you can tell Dot doesn't want him to leave yet. And you know she's dying to ask him more about the ghost, but she stops herself and instead she asks, “Uh…what's in the bag?”

He holds it up a bit. “Oh, this? Just some entertainment for tonight.”

“Like what kind of entertainment?”

He pulls out a string of firecrackers. “American entertainment.”

Troy grins and says, “We even got bottle rockets.”

“Dad's going to let you do that here?”

Stan scowls. “Are you kidding? We're on our way to Pioneer Village. Marko says the block parties over there get better every year.”

“What about
sjoelbak?
Aren't you going to play?”

He laughs. “Like I said, we're gonna have some
American
entertainment.”

They leave, and when Dot turns around, the look on her face is confused, almost sad.

Holly asks, “What's the matter?”

Dot sits down on a cot—which stays together just fine—and says, “We've always played
sjoelbak
. The whole family. And usually I wish Stan would just disappear 'cause he's such a pain in the neck, and he gets Troy acting all high and mighty, too. But now that he
is
going away…” She shakes her head. “I don't know. It's just weird.”

Holly tries to cheer her up with, “Well, it's not like there aren't going to be enough people…
we're
going to play, right?”

Marissa says, “Yeah. Where is this
sjoelbak
thing, anyway?”

Dot jumps to her feet. “Oh, that's right! We never did find it. Let's clean this place up and go check the basement.”

We pick everything up and tidy the cots, then follow Dot back toward the house.

The DeVrieses' basement wasn't through a skinny door and down some creaky stairs. Its entrance was outside, and the door was lying flat on the ground. Dot pulls up the door and we all stand around, looking down into this big black hole.

Marissa balks. “We're going down
there?
”

Dot laughs and says, “It's not spooky once I get the light on. Wait here if you want. I'll go down and turn it on.”

She disappears into the darkness, and after a minute the light comes on and she calls, “Come on down!”

So we file down the stairs, and the temperature drops with every step we take. The walls of the basement are plaster with big chunks missing, and the ceiling is only about seven feet high. There's a water heater, a furnace, and a bunch of pipes overhead, and then a group of pallets keeping boxes off the cement floor.

Holly says, “Wow, this is cool!”

Marissa rubs her arms and shivers. “Literally.”

Just then the basement ceiling creaks and we all look up. Dot says, “We're under the kitchen. That's Mom walking around up there.”

I say, “Listen! You can hear her talking!”

Dot says, “Yeah. There's a cupboard in the kitchen that has vents from the basement. In the old days they used the cupboard for storing potatoes and stuff you wanted to
keep cool. Dad says he's going to board it over, but so far he hasn't.”

Marissa says, “Well, I'm freezing! Is that thing down here or not?”

Dot laughs and says, “Let me check back here.” She climbs behind the boxes and a minute later she calls, “Here it is!” and a six-foot plank of rosewood with a one-inch curb on three sides comes scooting over the boxes. “Can you reach this?”

Holly grabs one end and I grab the other, and when Dot reappears she yanks on the light chain and says, “Let's go.”

We hauled the
sjoelbak
up and out, and then Dot and I carried it like a stretcher into the house. We propped it against a wall near the dining room table and then wandered into the kitchen, where Dot's mom was draining water from a pan of boiled potatoes.

Dot says, “We found the
sjoelbak,
Mom.”

“Great, hon.” She puts the pan down. “Maybe you could set the table? Only for eight. The boys are spending the night at Marko's.” She takes one look at Marissa and says, “Do I need to turn the heat up?”

Marissa laughs and then chatters, “No, I think I'll just go get something warmer on.”

So while the rest of us work at putting blue-and-white dishes on a bright blue tablecloth in the middle of a half-blue room, Marissa runs out to the carriage house to get a sweater. And we've just set out little windmill salt shakers when Marissa comes stumbling back inside.

She's not wearing a sweater or a jacket, and she's still looking about as warm as an ice cube, only now her face
has got about as much color, too. I say, “Marissa, are you all right?”

She nods, but her eyes are fixed straight ahead. Finally, she whispers, “But I think I want to go home.”

Mrs. DeVries comes over and eases her into a chair. “Are you sick?”

Marissa shakes her head.

“Then what is it? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

Marissa turns to Mrs. DeVries and whispers, “I don't know what else it could've been.”

Marissa looked like she'd seen a ghost all right, but I just couldn't buy it. I kneeled down next to her chair and said, “Marissa, there is no ghost. You just got spooked going out there by yourself.”

She snickers. That's all—just snickers. So I stand up and say, “Okay, so tell us what you saw.”

“Go see for yourself if you don't believe me.”

So we all go traipsing outside, me up front like I know exactly what I'm
not
going to see, and Mrs. DeVries in the back, coaxing Marissa along. And when I push open the carriage house door, I don't see white or light or anything ghoulish—what I see is a mess. There are clothes hanging from the rafters, others flung around the floor, and one of the cots is jackknifed closed.

Marissa looks straight at me. “See? And you should've heard the sound!”

“What sound?”

“It was a…a
ghost
sound!”

Now maybe if I'd been out there in the middle of the night by myself, I would've been spooked, too. But I wasn't out there by myself, and it wasn't even finished getting dark yet, so it was easy to say, “Marissa…this wasn't done by a ghost! Stan and Troy probably did it to try and scare us.”

Dot walks around with her head back, looking up at the rafters. “But Stan and Troy left half an hour ago!”

“That doesn't mean they didn't come back…”

Off in the distance a bell is ringing. Mrs. DeVries says, “That's our phone. Are you girls going to be all right?”

We say sure, so off she goes, and the minute she's gone Dot says, “If Stan and Troy did this, I'm going to kill them.”

We start picking clothes up and pulling them down, and Marissa's just starting to get some color back in her face when we hear,
Woooooooo…Wooooooooooooo!

Marissa gulps, “There! Do you hear that?”

Everybody freezes, and there it comes again,
Woooooooo…Wooooooooooo!
Marissa screams and runs out the door, then stands outside looking in at the rest of us, rooted like plants in a pot.

Dot whispers, “Where'd that come from?”

I point one direction, Holly points the other.

Dot looks at our arms shooting off in opposite directions and doesn't go anywhere. And we stand there for another minute, waiting for the sound to come again, and that's when I notice that the fog's coming in and it's gotten dark outside. Not pitch-black, but definitely dark.

Marissa whispers from the doorway, “Get
out
of there!”

Woooooo…Wooooooooo…
comes the sound again, and then on top of that comes a moaning sound—like someone far away, in a lot of pain.

We uprooted, all right, and we might have just bolted into the house if Dot hadn't grabbed us outside the carriage house and said, “Wait!”

We stare at her. “For
what?
”

She looks me in the eye. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No.”

She turns to Holly. “Do you?”

Holly shrugs.

“Marissa?”

Marissa shifts into hyper-dance. “I do now!”

Dot shakes her head and says, “This is stupid. C'mon,” then turns around and marches back into the carriage house.

Now what am I supposed to do, let her go into the Ghost Zone by herself ? So I go charging after her, and the minute we're inside she points and says, “You look over there, I'll look over here.”

Dot goes off in the direction of a stack of cardboard boxes, and I scoot my way over to a column of wooden pallets. But before I've had the chance to look behind the pallets, I hear Dot snap, “Get out of there. Get out now!”

A giggle floats through the air like a string of bubbles, and then Dot's got her little sister by the arm, demanding, “Where's Anneke?”

Beppie giggles some more, then points across the room to the stack of pallets. I look behind it and sure enough, there's the other ghost, looking like Little Miss Mischief.

She scrambles out and ducks around me, then escapes with her sister out the door and into the night.

Dot shakes her head and says, “Those two drive me bonkers.” By now Holly and Marissa have come inside, so she says to the three of us, “Look, why don't you guys go back in the house. I'll clean this mess up.”

We all say, No, no, we'll help, and before you know it, we've got the place picked up and put back together. And we're just about to close the door when Mrs. DeVries appears, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “There's a boy on the phone who says he wants to talk to Marissa.”

“To
me?
” Marissa asks, pointing to herself. “Who is it?”

“He wouldn't say.” She rubs crusted dough off a thumbnail with the towel. “I'm sure he's the one who called while I was out here, but the first time I picked up the phone and said DeVries he just hung up.”

Marissa says, “I'm…I'm sorry about that,” and then shakes her head. “I wonder who it could be?”

I whisper, “Mikey?” because being rude is what Marissa's little brother does best.

She shakes her head and shrugs, and then we all follow Mrs. DeVries into the house like ducklings back to the water.

Marissa picks up the phone and says, “This is Marissa,” and then she just stands there, listening. After a minute she mouths something, but we can't understand it. Then she says into the receiver, “Sure she'll want it back. She's right here, do you want to talk to her?” She looks straight at me, but when I ask, “Who is it?” she holds up a finger, telling me to wait. Then she says into the phone, “I don't think we can do that…no, we're celebrating New Year's at our friend's house.” She's quiet for a long time and then turns her back on us because we're bugging her so much, trying to find out who she's talking to. Finally, she motions for a pencil and says, “Okay, I'll take it down and
I'll ask them. Maybe we will, but I can't say for sure.” She writes some stuff down, then gets off the phone and says, “Guess who that was.” Like we hadn't spent the last few minutes trying to do just that.