The Ghost Witch (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Maybe I Made Him Up

Jenny rode her bike at top speed all the way home. When she got there, Mrs. Strauss and her mother were still sitting at the kitchen table.

“You are so lucky,” Mrs. Strauss was saying, when Jenny burst in, “that beautiful big house just waiting for you to move in! A gift from heaven!”

Jenny opened her mouth to tell them about the dragon, but her mother spoke first. “I know we're lucky,” she said. She sounded happier than she had in months. “I still can't believe it.” She held out a hand to Jenny. “Did you find my sunglasses, dear?”

Jenny looked at her mother's smiling face. Then she looked at Mrs. Strauss.
No backbone
, Mrs. Strauss was probably thinking.

“Here they are,” Jenny said. “They were on the dining-room table. I guess I'll watch television for a while.” She left the kitchen quickly, before the rest of what she'd wanted to tell her mother could come tumbling out.…
A big dragon thing with mean eyes and smoke coming from its mouth
!… The words would make her mother's smile disappear.
And I can't even prove I really saw a dragon
, she thought miserably.
If I try to show her, I just know there won't be anything in that mirror
.

The next afternoon Jenny got home from school just as her mother was returning from her job at the supermarket. “I'm going to Miss Nagle's house to do some cleaning,” Mrs. Warren said. “You come, too, Jenny. I could use some help.”

“NO!” The word popped out so loudly that Mrs. Warren stared at her.

“I mean,” Jenny said shakily, “I mean, I don't like it there, Mom. I just don't. It's scary!”

Her mother sighed. “Look, Jenny,” she said, “this is silly! You have to give the house a chance. We'll be working together, and it'll be fine. You'll see. The more time you spend there, the better you'll like it.”

Jenny shivered. She was sure she would never like it. Never, never, never! But no matter how much she protested, her mother insisted that she go.

Every afternoon that week and the next she and her mother drove across town to Miss Nagle's house. They threw open the windows to let in cool, fresh air while they swept and scrubbed and polished. Each day Rufus waited for them at the back door and followed them from room to room as they worked.

“You see?” Mrs. Warren said at the end of the second week. “Isn't this a great house, Jenny?”

Jenny nodded slowly. Nothing scary had happened to her since the day she'd seen the dragon in the mirror.

“I wonder if I just sort of made him up,” she whispered to Rufus one evening. “Like a bad dream.” She was sitting in the window seat of the big front bedroom that might be her own room someday. Rufus lay curled up in her lap.

My own bedroom and my own cat
, she thought.
Wait till Chris sees this room
!

When she met Chris in the school yard the next morning, her friend had news of her own.

“I just saw Mr. Barkin out looking for cans,” she said. “He told me he's going to have a big surprise for us on Halloween night.”

“But that's the night of the school party,” Jenny objected.

“I know,” Chris said. “But Mr. Barkin's surprise is going to happen
after
the party. It's supposed to help raise money for his Christmas Fund.”

“What do you think it is?” Jenny wondered. Then she remembered what she'd been waiting to say to Chris. “Want to go to Miss Nagle's house with me after school?” She tried to sound as if the invitation weren't important. “I guess we're going to live there, and I want to show you my bedroom.”

Chris twisted her bangs around a finger. “I think I'm busy,” she said.

“Please come,” Jenny said, forgetting to pretend it didn't matter. “My bedroom is really nice.”

“I guess I can go for a couple of minutes,” Chris said uneasily. “But I can't stay long, honest!”

That day, school seemed to last forever. Jenny made four mistakes in a spelling test, and she didn't hear her teacher call on her to answer a question. Her fingers kept closing around the ring of keys in her pocket, and each time she touched them, goose bumps peppered her arms. For some reason, the memory of the dragon head returned, scarier than ever.

On the way to Willowby Lane, Jenny decided that she and Chris wouldn't go into the dining room. And they wouldn't look in any mirrors. They would just go upstairs to see the bedroom, and they would feed Rufus, and they would leave.

A nice quiet visit to a nice old house
, she told herself.
That's what it will be
.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Terrible Lamp

“It's getting kind of dark, Jenny,” Chris said as they rode their bikes into Willowby Lane. “Maybe you should show me your bedroom some other day.”

“This'll just take a couple of minutes,” Jenny coaxed. “Come on, we'll hurry.” If they didn't do it now, she was afraid she'd never get Chris this far again.

They left their bikes at the front gate and made their way up the walk and around the side of the house. Jenny unlocked the door to the back porch and put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”

An eager
meow
came from inside the house.

“Rufus is saying hello to us,” Jenny said proudly. “We're pals.”

She unlocked the kitchen door and bent to pet the big cat. Chris petted him, too, but at the same time she looked around uneasily.

“It's not as cold as it was the last time I was here,” she said after a moment. “And it smells different. Nice—like someone lives here.”

Jenny sniffed. She smelled cleaning powder and a whiff of the hot chocolate she and her mother had drunk last night. She switched on the overhead light and saw that her mother had left a bouquet of wildflowers in the middle of the kitchen table.

“Come on,” she said, “I'll show you my room.” She turned on more lights as they hurried down the hall and up the wide front stairs. Rufus tagged behind them, happy to have company.

“Here it is. My room.” Jenny stepped to one side so Chris could get a good look at the brass bed and the wide window seat. “My mom says we'll get a new carpet later on.”

Chris turned one way, then the other. “It's so big!” she exclaimed. “This is really nice, Jenny. You're lucky!”

For the first time all day, Jenny relaxed. It was going to be all right. Chris wasn't afraid of the house anymore.

“We can go now, if you want to,” she offered. “I just have to feed Rufus on the way out.” She scooped up the cat in her arms and they went downstairs.

“That's just the dining room in there,” Jenny said. “It's nothing special,” she added hurriedly as Chris turned to look. “The living room's over here.”

Together they peered into the shadowy living room. Jenny reached to turn on a table lamp close to the door and then she hesitated. Perhaps it was because Rufus suddenly leaped out of her arms. Perhaps it was because she was looking closely at the lamp for the first time.

It had a wide tan shade, but it was the base that caught her eye. It was made of thick rings piled one on top of another.

“What's wrong?” Chris demanded. She sounded frightened again.

Jenny could hardly speak. “The—the lamp! The lamp is moving!”

It was true. The rings of the lamp were shifting, swelling, twisting. Jenny knew what they looked like, but she was too terrified to say the word. She felt Chris clutch her arm. Then the rings twisted hard, and the huge flat head of a snake shot out from under the lampshade.

“
Jenneeeee
!” Chris leaped backward, pulling Jenny with her. Both girls crashed into the doorframe and then into each other. As Jenny struggled to her feet, the snake darted toward her again, its long tongue flicking. The girls raced down the hall to the kitchen, stumbling over Rufus as they flew out the back door and ran to their bikes.

“We're going over there together,” Mrs. Warren said. “Right now.”

“No,” Jenny said, “I can't.”

“Yes, you can,” her mother said firmly. “I know something frightened you, but it certainly wasn't a snake wrapped around a lamp. That's just foolish, dear. The living room was probably too dark for you to see anything clearly.”

“It wasn't
that
dark,” Jenny said. She felt worse every minute as she followed her mother downstairs and out to the car. Neither of them spoke as they drove across town and parked in Willowby Lane.

The back-porch door stood open and both doors were unlocked, just as the girls had left them. Mrs. Warren looked at Jenny sharply, but she didn't scold. Rufus was perched on the counter close to the door. He jumped to the floor and followed Mrs. Warren as she took his dish out to the porch to fill it.

“I'm not going in,” Jenny said. She waited on the porch, hardly daring to breathe, while her mother went down the hall to the living room.

After a moment, Mrs. Warren returned. She was carrying the lamp in her arms. “Look at this, Jenny.” She set it on the kitchen table and stood back so Jenny could see it from the porch. The overhead light shone on the varnished wood rings that made up the lamp's base.

“I know it isn't beautiful,” Mrs. Warren said, “but it isn't a snake either. Just a pile of wood rings, see? I'm sure you must have dusted it when we were cleaning, Jenny. Where in the world did you get that weird idea about the snake?”

“Chris saw it, too,” Jenny said. She felt like crying.

“I'm beginning to think Chris is the one whose imagination is working overtime,” said Mrs. Warren. “First it's doors that slam shut by themselves. Now it's a snake in the living room.” She smiled and gave Jenny a big hug. “Maybe Chris is going to write ghost stories when she grows up.”

Jenny wouldn't smile back. Her mother didn't know about the dragon in the dining-room mirror. And she hadn't heard what Chris said when they parted an hour ago.

“Don't ever ask me to go into that house again, Jenny,” she'd said in a quivering voice. “Because I'm not going to do it. Even if it means we aren't best friends anymore.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Chicken Jenny

The roof of the apartment house was Jenny's favorite thinking-place, especially on cool October evenings. From up there she could see treetops and church steeples all across town. If she looked hard enough, she could even find the tip of Miss Nagle's chimney.

Not that I want to
, Jenny thought unhappily. Three days had passed since she and Chris had seen the snake. Before that, she'd been planning where she'd put her things in the big front bedroom, and had wondered whether Rufus would curl up on her bed at night. Now she couldn't bear to think about the house on Willowby Lane.

“Forget about the snake,” her mother kept saying. “Your eyes were playing tricks on you, dear. Once we move in, you'll love being there.”