The Haunting of Heck House (11 page)

Karl “Feedback” Wu was known around Wiggins Cross as something of a techno-wizard (and aspiring lead guitarist for an as-yet-unformed but soon-to-be-wildly-popular rock band). He was the same age as Pilot—
fourteen—but Feedback sported the kind of perpetually cheery grin and bouncy, wound-up, go-get-'em attitude that made it seem like he was actually a lot younger than that.

The twins didn't know him all that well, but what they did know of him, they liked. The only thing that tweaked their suspicions was his—in their opinion— over-reliance on technology. The fact that he could walk, talk, text and play cartoon zombie-smasher games on his newfangled phone all at the same time made them wary. The twins, of course, relied on oldfangled technology that was far more trustworthy. Anything with a computer chip in it was, in their eyes, instantly suspect. And probably prone to government (or possibly alien) tracking.

“Hey! I saw your flyers,” he said. “Nice work. Do you guys have a website?”

“Uh …” The twins exchanged another set of nervous glances.

“Tweed doesn't like spiders,” Cheryl blurted.

“You promised not to tell!” Tweed hissed.

Cheryl grimaced. “Sorry. Bit frazzled here …”

But Feedback didn't seem to notice the exchange. “Y'know,” he said, jumping out of the chair and wandering into the middle of the room without taking his eyes off the phone in his hand, “I've never sat for a place that didn't have any kids in it before. It's kinda weird. And I haven't found a refrigerator yet. Or a
kitchen for that matter. And these hallways go on for miles! I thought I was stuck in a maze or something. Feels like I've been wandering up and down the same darn corridor for an hour now. Also? I think this place has maintenance issues. And rats. I keep hearing noises in the walls.”

Neither of the twins could get a word in edgewise, but for the moment, that was okay. They needed to gather all the necessary intel they could before they shared their own conclusions about the direness of the situation.

“Have you guys seen Hazel or Cindy yet?” Feedback continued. “I texted them yesterday and they said they were gonna be here, too. Maybe they chickened out. Have you found a TV? Or a sound system? Or a video game set-up? Man, I could
totally
go for pizza pops …”

“What are you doing?” Cheryl asked finally, pointing to the phone.

“Oh. Looking for a signal.” His sunny demeanour clouded over with a sudden, deeply perplexed frown. “I've been trying to pick something up ever since I got here and I don't get it. I'm not getting
any
thing. Like— capital N nothing. No signal—hey wait! ‘No Signal.' That's a great name for a band!” He paused and made a note on his phone and then continued. “I mean, Wiggins Cross has super-crappy wi-fi at the best of times but I customized this baby so that I could pick up a signal from the moon! Only … this house is, like, a totally
dead
zone.”

“Yeah …” Tweed nodded grimly. “That's kind of what we're afraid of.”

A sudden crackling of frost spread across the window next to them as the temperature in the room instantly plummeted.

“Whoa,” Feedback said, and the girls could see his breath. “Old Mr. H better get the heating/cooling system serviced in this dump. That a/c is turned up way too high …”

There was another crackling sound—only this time it came from overhead—and Cheryl dove for Feedback, shouldering him out of the way just as the room's overhead chandelier came crashing down in a perilously musical, rainbow-coloured explosion of brass and crystal.

Feedback gulped and whispered, “Thanks …”

In the silence that followed, they heard the sound of laughter, high-pitched and echoing. Feedback blinked and looked up at the hole in the ceiling where the light fixture used to hang.

“So …
not
rats?” he asked.

Tweed shook her head and bent to examine one of the crystals.

Feedback knit his brow in an angry frown. “Wow. Maybe Cindy and Hazel did show after all! I mean, I knew those other babysitting girls were hard-core, but that's a pretty lousy way to try and win a stupid contest. They coulda busted open my melon with a stunt like that!”

“Yeah …” Cheryl tugged her pigtails straight, a frown creasing the freckles on her nose. “That's what I thought when the grand piano came crashing down the stairs at us, but …”

“I'm not so sure,” Tweed murmured, staring up into the hole in the ceiling.

“Oh, c'mon.” Feedback snorted, looking back and forth between the twins. “What—you guys think this place is, like,
haunted
or something? That there's, like, what … supernatural creatures skulking around?”

Suddenly, the French doors flew wide open and the long white curtains billowed like ghosts of departed opera divas making grand entrances. A frantic flapping outside in the twilight gloom sent Cheryl and Tweed scrambling for cover. Tweed dove behind the wingback chair while Cheryl dropped to all fours and scuttled under the desk, dragging an astonished Feedback with her.

“Das Wampyre!” Tweed whispered.

“Das what?” Feedback yelped.

“Shh!” Cheryl hissed.

A winged shadow swept into the room. Sure enough, it looked as if it was being cast by a giant bat right out of an old Dracula movie. The twins held their breath. Mummies bearing curses and possessed inanimate objects were one thing. Ghosts … well, that was something else. But honestly. Vampires?
Real
vampires? They were another thing entirely!

Cheryl tracked the shadow's progress as it flowed
across the wall … dipped awkwardly … and then did a kind of flailing loop-de-loop thing and dropped like a stone. A loud crash sounded from the other side of the room, over by the table and chairs, but she couldn't see what had happened.

A clumsy Creature of the Night?
she wondered.
I suppose it's possible …

“Well, that's just spiffy,” Cheryl muttered under her breath.

Whatever the thing was, it certainly wasn't graceful. Still, something had to be done. Not having anticipated any kind of scenario that included fangs, the twins had gone light on vamp prep when they'd packed their respective gear bags for the night at Hecklestone House. They were only equipped with a pair of emergency stakes (really, just a couple of broken school rulers) and a jumbo plastic shaker bottle of dried garlic flakes. Not nearly as effective on Creatures of the Night, perhaps, as whole fresh bulbs, but then Tweed had recently used chili powder to deflect a mummy attack. Anything that could potentially cause sneezing was a useful addition to a weapons inventory.

Tweed could hear Cheryl muttering and digging around in her bag and knew she was probably searching for their emergency stakes. If only Tweed could manage to prepare a garlic Nerf grenade in time, it might give Cheryl the chance to find the weapons and then they both might be able to get the heck out of there. Tweed
fumbled in her bag as quietly as she could for kitchen spice and a sponge ball, and readied herself for attack. If she could draw the deadly attention of the fiend, she could give Cheryl the needed precious seconds to launch a secondary attack from behind.

Vampire fighting was all timing and strategy.

And it was a darn good thing that the twins had been honing both those skills for most of their young lives. At a strangled gasp from Feedback, Cheryl glanced up from her pack to see a person-shaped shadow slithering up the wall. Feedback's eyes grew huge as a pair of shiny, pointy-toed black shoes, visible beneath black trouser legs, walked slowly, ominously across the chessboard rug. They stopped directly in front of where Cheryl and Feedback crouched beneath the desk. Feedback held his breath, and Cheryl gripped her ruler so hard the edge of it bit into her palm.

Then a pale face, mostly obscured by darkness, popped down to peer at them.

“Good eeEEee-ven-ing,” a voice intoned in a classic Dracula drawl. “Allow me to intro—GLAA—”

The vampy greeting was cut short as, with a furious battle cry, Cheryl launched herself at the creature's knees, bowling him over and knocking him out into the middle of the room.

“Kill it!” Feedback screeched in terror.

“Stake it!” Tweed shouted, frantically readying a garlic bomb.

“Darn it!” the villainous vampire exclaimed as the black silk cape flipped up over his face, effectively tangling the evil creature in a helpless heap and rendering his struggles largely ineffectual.

“Got it!” Cheryl cried triumphantly, raising the ruler over her head.

“Mff! Mff!” the vamp protested, muffled by the bundle of cape cloth. “MFF-GLAACK!!”

“Wait!”

Tweed suddenly leaped into the fray, flinging her cousin off the thrashing creature of darkness before Cheryl managed to pin him to the carpet with her stake. Cheryl tumbled into a series of shoulder rolls initiated by Tweed's dragging, and popped up onto her feet, in a fight-ready, fists-flailing stance.

“What didja do that for?” She frowned at her cousin in confusion.

“That ‘GLAACK!!'” Tweed explained, pointing at the writhing heap of evening attire on the floor. “I
know
that ‘GLAACK!!'”

“What?” Cheryl blinked at her. “You don't think …” She turned and nudged the bundle on the floor with the toe of her sneaker. “Artie Bartleby?”

“Mrff …”

“What on
earth
are you doing here?”

Artie sprang to his feet, threw back the cape he wore draped over his shoulders and ran a hand over the top of his head, smoothing down chunks of rogue hair spiking
out in random directions. Beneath the cloak—which, they now saw, looked more like a swanky private school formal robe—he wore a tailored suit jacket, emblazoned with a crest of some kind, and a pressed white shirt and striped black-and-red cravat tied neatly at his throat. Giving them a super-suave wink, accompanied by an enhanced finger point, he grinned.

Tweed and Cheryl were both rendered utterly speechless.

 

8
PANICKED ROOM

T
weed was the first to recover. “Uh …
Artie
?” Her jaw drifted open at the sight of their former annoying mini-nemesis turned stalwart sidekick/handy fall guy. There was simply no earthly way that the Artie Bartleby the twins knew and (occasionally) loved to tease mercilessly could pull off
that
level of sophistication. No. Way.

“Ladies,” Artie Bartleby said, sauntering casually over to the fireplace where he leaned on an elbow and struck a debonair pose. The suit he wore was so meticulously tailored and pressed you could have sliced cheese on his trouser creases.

The twins exchanged uncertain glances and Cheryl took a cautious step forward. “What's the deal, Shrimpcake?” she asked, eyes narrowing as she took in his drastically altered appearance, head to shiny-shod
foot. “You a creature of evil again? All minioned up? Possessed? Cursed? What's the deal?”

“Don't be foolish, my little cauliflower,” he said and laughed a devil-may-care laugh. “I'm my same old, same old self.”

“Uh-huh …”

He licked the tip of his baby finger and ran it along the quirked contour of his eyebrow, above his horn-rimmed glasses—which somehow suddenly looked chic when paired with the tailored duds. “Clothes make the man, don'tcha know?” Artie said, and grinned.

At that point, Feedback crawled out from under the desk. He brushed some carpet lint off his cargo pants and straightened the headphones circling his neck.

“Hey, hey, Feedback!” Artie said with a smooth wave. Helping out at Bartleby's Gas & Gulp, his mom's gas station and general store, meant that Artie knew pretty much everyone in the town of Wiggins Cross.

“That's my name, don't wear it out!” Feedback offered Artie a wobbly grin and air-guitared a riff on his phone that ended with a screech of crunchy amplifier feedback.

The distorted noise bloomed out, echoing loudly in the high-ceilinged room, and there was an answering screech from over near the French doors. A blur of flappy, growling movement surged toward them and Cheryl suddenly remembered the winged shadow that had preceded Artie into the room and lent him the illusion of vampirosity.

The thing flew at Feedback, who dropped to the floor and covered his head. Grey, bat-like wings slapped at the air, obscuring glimpses of red gleaming eyes, a sharp-hooked beak and talons—all attached to something the size of a large house cat!

“Ramshackle!” Artie yelled. “Down, boy! Girl! Thing!”

Tweed looked at him in astonishment.

“I haven't really had a chance to figure that out yet, okay?”

“Shrimpcake!” Cheryl was trying to shoo the whirlwind-scrabbling creature away from poor Feedback, who cowered in a ball. “What on earth is that thing?”

“I found him out on the balcony!” Artie said. “He's harmless! C'mere, buddy …” He darted forward and grappled with the hissing, spitting mini-monster, pulling it away by the scruff of its neck. “Sit!” he said, admonishing him with a pointing finger.

The thing cocked its head and regarded him sideways.

“Siiiitt,” he said again.

“Grr-mrowf,” Ramshackle murmured and, after a moment, sat.

“Whoa …” Karl said in almost a whisper. “What the heck
is
that?”

“Uh … house cat?” Artie tried unconvincingly, seeming to have just realized that maybe Feedback wasn't as used to weirdness as Cheryl and Tweed. “Exotic breed.
Millionaires, y'know.” He waved vaguely at the opulent architecture all around them.

“Artie”—Tweed took a step forward, peering at the little monster—“is that a
gargoyle
?”

“Well, I dunno.” Artie shrugged. “I think it's probably a safe bet, though. He was perched on the roof of this creepy old house when I found him.”

“Mrrr-ackk-k-rrowr …?” the gargoyle burbled inquiringly and ruffled his batwings.