The Haunting of Heck House (2 page)

As Pops ambled off, the girls braced themselves for the movie's big finish—wherein the clueless couple, Freddy and Marlene, hire a wacky mystic who holds a seance to rid the house of its wicked ways and evil attitude. Only, of course, to have the whole thing spectacularly backfire with huge amounts of supernatural fireworks and running and screaming as the old film fades to the end credits. Giggling and satisfied, Cheryl and Tweed punched each other in the arm.

Another successful movie night at the old Drive-In.

After the flick, the girls took a bit of a detour on the way to the white farmhouse they called home, bypassing the Drive-In's mini-putt range and swinging by the big old red barn—which housed C+T headquarters—to drop off their 3D glasses, customized with sparkle stickers and glitter glue, and stash their favourite movie-watching blankets and pillows.

They were on their way out of the barn when they caught sight of a small square envelope, lying on the floor just inside the barn door.

“Hey! Look at this!” Cheryl bent down to examine the rather fancy-looking stationery illuminated by a single shaft of moonlight. The envelope was made of
heavy, cream-coloured paper with a ruffle-edged flap. Inside was an antique-looking formal invitation.

Tweed leaned over Cheryl's shoulder as she read the precise, elegantly embossed, gold lettering.

“Holy moly!” Cheryl exclaimed. “This could be our ticket to the big time!”

“Oh, absolutely.” Tweed nodded vigorously. “Our sitting skills are honed. Razor sharp. Especially after the carnival incident and the addition of our pet-minding services par excellence.”

The girls grabbed hands and began to jump around the barn in a crazy little dance of super-sitter glee.

A week earlier, a travelling carnival had set up shop— or, rather, tents—in the empty field across the road from the Drive-In, and through a series of unfortunate events had unleashed a cursed mummy princess on the unsuspecting Wiggins folk. Thanks to the timely intervention and curse-foiling pizzazz of Cheryl and Tweed, along with their best friend, Yeager “Pilot” Armbruster, and their ten-year-old nemesis-turned-trusty-sidekick, Artie Bartleby, the town was saved. All this had happened at the same time as the girls had been engaged in cat-sitting fifteen—
fifteen!
—furballs for the town's middle school librarian, Marjorie Parks.

“I'll bet you Miz Parks has been chatting up friends and acquaintances,” Cheryl surmised, slapping the stiff paper invite in the palm of her hand. “No doubt regaling them with tales of our superior customer care and the overall satisfaction of her passel of puddins.”

“No doubt,” Tweed agreed. “Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool. And our new flyers and capital
W-O-W slogan branding should get us some serious sitter traction.”

W-O-W stood for “While-O-Wait.” The slogan had started life as a typo on Cheryl and Tweed's business cards—the girls took their fledgling sitter business very seriously—and had been meant to read “While-
U
-Wait” but instead had come back from the printer reading:

Instead of correcting the glitch and shelling out allowance money for another print run, the twins had embraced the quirky phrase and used it as both a catchy (if somewhat nonsensical) slogan and motivational expression.

“Totally,” Cheryl said, in answer to Tweed's assertion. “Odd to think that, in light of all that, this Sir Heck-en-whatzits fellow wouldn't just offer us the contract right off the bat.”

“Sure,” Tweed said. “Although, to be fair … I don't remember delivering any flyers to anywhere on that street.”

“Good point. In fact,
I'm
not even sure I know where that street is.”

Tweed trotted over to the work table on the other side of the Moviemobile, a 1964 Mercury Comet convertible with an old TV bolted to the hood and a VHS player retrofitted under the dash (perfect for movie watching on the nights when the Drive-In was dark), and fished through a stacked pile of envelopes and papers, looking for a map of the town of Wiggins Cross. The girls had been using it to plan their flyer routes and distribute freshly printed info sheets in the wake of their successful retrieval of a quartet of escaped toddlers—the Bottoms boys—advertising a one-time-only discount for new clients. Never mind the fact that the very next day the girls had then had to rescue the boys from an ancient curse that had transformed them into the reptilian minions of an Egyptian mummy princess. In the end, disaster had been averted and Mr. and Mrs. Bottoms had been none the wiser.

Of course, Cheryl and Tweed hadn't been able to use any of that in their promotional material. But they'd been buoyed by their successes nevertheless, and it had spurred their advertising efforts. They must have stuffed fifty mailboxes with flyers. At least. Maybe this Hecklestone House had been one of them.

After a few moments of paper shuffling, Tweed found what she was looking for and spread the map out on the work table, smoothing down the creases and
flattening the edges. There were marks on the map made in neon marker—streets and neighbourhoods circled and crossed off—all places where the girls had covered territory in their bouts of flyer blitzing. Which meant that, with the exception of the downtown business district and a somewhat industrial zone on the eastern edge of town, most of the map was a brightly coloured patchwork.

“Eerie … Eerie …” Tweed muttered, running her finger in a zigzag pattern from side to side across the town's contours. “I don't see any—wait! Here it is … Eerie Lane.”

“Lessee!”

Cheryl leaned on her elbows over the map and looked at where Tweed's finger pinned the paper. She blinked, not certain what her cousin was pointing to, at first. But then, sure enough, there was a line—barely more than a half-inch squiggle—that branched off at a right angle about three-quarters of a mile down past where Rural Route #1 crossed a dilapidated old covered bridge on the western edge of town. It was well within bike-riding distance, and yet the girls had never encountered the little street. Maybe it was because that particular bit of map seemed … faded. Foggy. Just a bit out of focus compared to the crisp lines that criss-crossed the rest of the paper's surface. Probably a printing error.

“Well, I'll be danged,” Cheryl murmured. She straightened up and blew a strand of twisty strawberry-blonde
hair out of her eyes. “I have to admit, I am intrigued.”

“Intrigued enough to take the night off from our usual movie watching?” Tweed asked.

“A sacrifice to be sure, but one I feel we should make, under the circumstances,” Cheryl said in all seriousness.

“Oh, definitely.” Tweed nodded. “We are, after all, seekers of the unknown.”

“You got that right, partner. And it's kinda, I dunno, refreshing to know that there are still unknowns to be known in a place like Wiggins.”

“The mysteries of the universe unfold before us.”

“Tomorrow first thing, we'll get our sitter gear together and prepare to embark on this new adventure,” Cheryl said, stifling a yawn. “While-O-Wait!”

“W-O-W, indeed,” Tweed said with satisfaction. “That old Heck House won't know what hit it!”

 

2
IT CAME FROM
THE
FOURTH DIMENSION!
(PREVIOUSLY TITLED: IT CAME FROM THE THIRD DIMENSION 2)

P
reparations for the House-Sitter Smackdown Extravaganza were necessarily delayed the next morning when the girls found a note on the refrigerator door from their grandfather. Pops had risen early and was out in the far Drive-In lot, busy repairing one of the movie projectors for the Starlight Paradise's second screen. About a year earlier, a ferocious lightning storm had zapped the projection booth, causing the projector to blow a gasket, and Pops had been looking around for new parts to repair it. Because it was an older machine, his search wasn't an easy one, but he'd finally tracked down all the doohickeys that he needed. In the note, Pops mentioned that he'd enlisted the help of the twins' best friend, Pilot, who was handy with tools and fixing stuff. (Pilot's dad had been the one flying the plane that
had disappeared with Cheryl and Tweed's families, and he'd inherited an old crop-duster that was forever in need of tinkering and tune-ups, so the twins knew he'd be more than happy to lend a hand.)

Pops asked if, in the meantime, the girls wouldn't mind taking care of another Drive-In maintenance issue. Seemed that a patron had complained—on the second night of Cheryl and Tweed's first-ever programming stint, a triple bill of creature movies—that his in-car speaker had been malfunctioning. Seeing as how the first night had been cancelled because everyone in town had gone to the carnival across the road, the girls were keen on optimizing all future movie-going experiences for their patrons, and so they hopped right to the task of hunting down exactly which speaker out of over a hundred in the lot was out of kilter.

Cheryl stood, fists on her hips, and gazed out over the vast sea of metal boxes perched on poles. “Huh. So. Which one d'you think it is?” she asked Tweed.

Tweed's grey eyes narrowed as she contemplated the question. “Could be any one of 'em …” Not about to be daunted by the potentially day-devouring task set before them, she shrugged one shoulder and cocked her head. “Maybe we should spice up the job with a good old-fashioned round of ACTION!!”

Cheryl nodded enthusiastically. “Capital idea!” she said.

ACTION!! was a favourite game of make-believe
the girls were fond of playing when faced with a tedious or difficult task. In ACTION!! mode, the twins were no longer small-town girls in a small-town world, but larger-than-life heroes living lives of high adventure. They could see it all—just like a movie storyboard! And hear it all—just like dialogue from a movie script!

With a bit of pre-chore preparation, along with a healthy dose of imagination (which the twins were in no short supply thereof) and a few “magic words,” the Great Speaker Hunt was on! The girls exchanged their C+T Secret Signal (patent pending), which consisted of one winky eye, a pointing index finger pressed against the side of the nose and a firm nod.

“Cameras rolling …”

“Aaaaand …”

 

“... ACTION!!”

EXT. TEMPLE RUINS IN A JUNGLE SETTING -- MORNING

CAMERA PUSHES IN SLOWLY toward a pair of FEMALE FIGURES, laden with gear, creeping cautiously toward an ELABORATELY CARVED STONE ARCHWAY, the entrance to a VINE-SHROUDED ANCIENT TEMPLE. The only sounds heard are nervous BIRDSONG and the eerie whispering of tropical LEAVES.

CLOSE-UP ON: a TATTERED MAP held in a pair of steady hands. There is a dotted line leading to an ominous SKULL-MARKS-THE-SPOT.

CAMERA RISES up from map to a TWO-SHOT of our heroes: A PAIR OF WILY TREASURE HUNTERS, dressed in adventurer-practical ensembles.