The Headless Ghost Read online

  Contents

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  Teaser

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Stephanie Alpert and I haunt our neighborhood.

  We got the idea last Halloween.

  There are a lot of kids in our neighborhood, and we like to haunt them and give them a little scare.

  Sometimes we sneak out late at night in masks and stare into kids’ windows. Sometimes we leave rubber hands and rubber fingers on windowsills. Sometimes we hide disgusting things in mailboxes.

  Sometimes Stephanie and I duck down behind bushes or trees and make the most frightening sounds — animal howls and ghostly moans. Stephanie can do a terrifying werewolf howl. And I can toss back my head and shriek loud enough to shake the leaves on the trees.

  We keep almost all the kids on our block pretty frightened.

  In the mornings, we catch them peeking out their doors, seeing if it’s safe to come out. And at night, most of them are afraid to leave their houses alone.

  Stephanie and I are really proud of that.

  During the day we are just Stephanie Alpert and Duane Comack, two normal twelve-year-olds. But at night, we become the Twin Terrors of Wheeler Falls.

  No one knows. No one.

  Look at us, and you see two sixth graders at Wheeler Middle School. Both of us have brown eyes and brown hair. Both of us are tall and thin. Stephanie is a few inches taller because she has higher hair.

  Some people see us hanging out together and think we’re brother and sister. But we’re not. We don’t have any brothers and sisters, and we don’t mind one bit.

  We live across the street from one another. We walk to school together in the morning. We usually trade lunches, even though our parents both pack us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

  We’re normal. Totally normal.

  Except for our secret late-night hobby.

  How did we become the Twin Terrors? Well, it’s sort of a long story….

  * * *

  Last Halloween was a cool, clear night. A full moon floated over the bare trees.

  I was standing outside Stephanie’s front window in my scary Grim Reaper costume. I stood up on tiptoes, trying to peek inside to check out her costume.

  “Hey — beat it, Duane! No looking!” she shouted through the closed window. Then she pulled down the shade.

  “I wasn’t looking. I was just stretching!” I shouted back.

  I was eager to see what Stephanie was going to be. Every Halloween, she comes up with something awesome. The year before, she came waddling out inside a huge ball of green toilet paper. You guessed it. She was an iceberg lettuce.

  But this year I thought maybe I had her beat.

  I’d worked really hard on my Grim Reaper costume. I wore high platform shoes — so high that I’d tower over Stephanie. My black, hooded cape swung along the ground. I hid my curly brown hair under a tight rubber skullcap. And I smeared my face with sick-looking makeup, the color you see on moldy bread.

  My dad didn’t want to look at me. He said I turned his stomach.

  A success!

  I couldn’t wait to make Stephanie sick! I banged my Grim Reaper sickle on Stephanie’s window. “Hey, Steph — hurry up!” I called. “I’m getting hungry. I want candy!”

  I waited and waited. I started pacing back and forth across her front lawn, my long cape sweeping over the grass and dead leaves.

  “Hey! Where are you?” I called again.

  No Stephanie.

  With an impatient groan, I turned back to the house.

  And a huge, hairy animal jumped me from behind and chewed off my head.

  Well, it didn’t really chew off my head.

  But it tried to.

  It growled and tried to sink its gleaming fangs into my throat.

  I staggered back. The creature looked like an enormous black cat, covered in thick, black bristles. Gobs of yellow goo poured from its hairy ears and black nose. Its long, pointed fangs glowed in the dark.

  The creature snarled again and shot out a hairy paw. “Candy … give me all your candy!”

  “Stephanie — ?” I choked out. It was Stephanie. Wasn’t it?

  The creature jabbed its claws into my stomach in reply. That’s when I recognized Stephanie’s Mickey Mouse watch on its hairy wrist.

  “Wow. Stephanie, you look awesome! You really — ” I didn’t finish. Stephanie ducked behind the hedge and yanked me down beside her.

  My knees hit the sidewalk hard. “Ow! Are you crazy?” I shrieked. “What’s the big idea?”

  A group of little kids in costumes paraded by. Stephanie leapt out of the hedge. “Arrrggghhh!” she growled.

  The little kids totally freaked. They turned and started to run. Three of them dropped their trick-or-treat bags. Stephanie scooped up the bags. “Yummmm!”

  “Whoa! You really scared them,” I said, watching the little kids run up the street. “That was cool.”

  Stephanie started to laugh. She has a high, silly laugh that always starts me laughing, too. It sounds like a chicken being tickled. “That was kind of fun,” she replied. “More fun than trick-or-treating.”

  So we spent the rest of the night scaring kids.

  We didn’t get much candy. But we had a great time.

  “I wish we could do this every night!” I exclaimed as we walked home.

  “We can,” Stephanie said, grinning. “It doesn’t have to be Halloween to scare kids, Duane. Get my meaning?”

  I got her meaning.

  She tossed back her bristly head and let out her chicken laugh. And I laughed, too.

  And that’s how Stephanie and I started haunting our neighborhood. Late at night, the Twin Terrors strike, up and down our neighborhood. We’re everywhere!

  Well … almost everywhere.

  There’s one place in our neighborhood that even Stephanie and I are afraid of.

  It’s an old stone house on the next block. It’s called Hill House. I guess that’s because it sits up on a high hill on Hill Street.

  I know. I know. A lot of towns have a haunted house.

  But Hill House really is haunted.

  Stephanie and I know that for sure.

  Because that’s where we met the Headless Ghost.

  Hill House is the biggest tourist attraction in Wheeler Falls. Actually, it’s the only one.

  Maybe you’ve heard of Hill House. It’s written up in a lot of books.

  Tour guides in creepy black uniforms give the Hill House tour every hour. The guides will act real scary and tell frightening stories about the house. Some of the ghost stories give me cold shivers.

  Stephanie and I love to take the tour — especially with Otto. Otto is our favorite guide.

  Otto is big and bald and scary-looking. He has tiny black eyes that seem to stare right through you. And he has a booming voice that comes from deep inside his huge chest.

  Sometimes when Otto leads us from room to room in the old house, he lowers his voice to a whisper. He talks so low, we can barely hear him. Then his tiny eyes will bulge. He’ll point — and scream: “There’s the gho
st! There!”

  Stephanie and I always scream.

  Even Otto’s smile is scary.

  Stephanie and I have taken the Hill House tour so often, we could probably be tour guides. We know all the creepy old rooms. All the places where ghosts have been spotted.

  Real ghosts!

  It’s the kind of place we love.

  Do you want to know the story of Hill House? Well, here’s the story that Otto, Edna, and the other guides tell:

  * * *

  Hill House is two hundred years old. And it’s been haunted practically from the day the stones were gathered to build it.

  A young sea captain built the house for his new bride. But the day the big house was finished, the captain was called out to sea.

  His young wife moved into the huge house all alone. It was cold and dark, and the rooms and hallways seemed to stretch on forever.

  For months and months, she stared out of their bedroom window. The window that faced the river. Waiting patiently for the captain’s return.

  Winter passed. Then spring, then summer.

  But he never came back.

  The captain was lost at sea.

  One year after the sea captain disappeared, a ghost appeared in the halls of Hill House. The ghost of the young sea captain. He had come back from the dead, back to find his wife.

  Every night he floated through the long, twisting halls. He carried a lantern and called out his wife’s name. “Annabel! Annabel!”

  But Annabel never answered.

  In her grief, she had fled from the old house. She never wanted to see it again.

  Another family had moved in. As the years passed, many people heard the ghost’s nightly calls. “Annabel! Annabel!” Through the twisting halls and cold rooms of the house.

  “Annabel! Annabel!”

  People heard the sad, frightening calls. But no one ever saw the ghost.

  Then, one hundred years ago, a family named Craw bought the house. The Craws had a thirteen-year-old boy named Andrew.

  Andrew was a nasty, mean-natured boy. He delighted in playing cruel tricks on the servants. He scared them out of their wits.

  He once threw a cat out of a window. He was disappointed when it survived.

  Even Andrew’s own parents couldn’t stand to spend time with the mean-tempered boy. He spent his days on his own, exploring the old mansion, looking for trouble he could get into.

  One day he discovered a room he had never explored before. He pushed open the heavy wooden door. It let out a loud creak.

  Then he stepped inside.

  A lantern glowed dimly on a small table. The boy saw no other furniture in the large room. No one at the table.

  “How strange,” he thought. “Why should I find a burning lantern in an empty room?”

  Andrew approached the lantern. As he leaned down to lower the wick, the ghost appeared.

  The sea captain!

  Over the years, the ghost had grown into an old and terrifying creature. He had long white fingernails that curled in spirals. Cracked black teeth poked out from between swollen, dry lips. And a scraggly white beard hid the ghost’s face from view.

  The boy stared in horror. “Who — who are you?” he stammered.

  The ghost didn’t utter a word. He floated in the yellow lantern light, glaring hard at the boy.

  “Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?” the boy demanded.

  When the ghost still didn’t reply, Andrew turned — and tried to run.

  But before he moved two steps, he felt the ghost’s cold breath on his neck.

  Andrew grabbed for the door. But the old ghost swirled around him, swirled darkly, a swirl of black smoke in the dim yellow light.

  “No! Stop!” the boy screamed. “Let me go!”

  The ghost’s mouth gaped open, revealing a bottomless black hole. Finally, it spoke — in a whisper that sounded like the scratch of dead leaves. “Now that you have seen me, you cannot leave.”

  “No!” the boy shrieked. “Let me go! Let me go!”

  The ghost ignored the boy’s cries. He repeated his dry, cold words: “Now that you have seen me, you cannot leave.”

  The old ghost raised his hands to the boy’s head. His icy fingers spread over Andrew’s face. The hands tightened. Tightened.

  Do you know what happened next?

  The ghost pulled off the boy’s head — and hid it somewhere in the house!

  After hiding the head, hiding it away in the huge, dark mansion, the ghost of the sea captain let out a final howl that made the heavy stone walls tremble.

  The terrifying howl ended with the cry, “Annabel! Annabel!”

  Then the old ghost disappeared forever.

  But Hill House was not freed from ghosts. A new ghost now haunted the endless, twisting halls.

  From then on, Andrew haunted Hill House. Every night the ghost of the poor boy searched the halls and rooms, looking for his missing head.

  All through the house, say Otto and the other tour guides, you can hear the footsteps of the Headless Ghost, searching, always searching.

  And each room of the house now has a terrifying story of its own.

  Are the stories true?

  Well, Stephanie and I believe them. That’s why we take the tour so often.

  We must have explored the old place at least a hundred times.

  Hill House is such awesome fun.

  At least it was fun — until Stephanie had another one of her bright ideas.

  After Stephanie’s bright idea, Hill House wasn’t fun anymore.

  Hill House became a truly scary place.

  The trouble started a few weeks ago when Stephanie suddenly got bored.

  It was about ten o’clock at night. We were out haunting the neighborhood. We did our terrifying wolf howl outside Geena Jeffers’ window. Then we went next door to Terri Abel’s house. We put some chicken bones in her mailbox — just because it’s creepy to reach in your mailbox and feel bones.

  Then we crept across the street to Ben Fuller’s house.

  Ben was our last stop for the night. Ben is a kid in our class, and we have a special scare for him.

  You see, he’s afraid of bugs, which makes him really easy to scare.

  Even though it’s pretty cold out, he sleeps with his bedroom window open. So Stephanie and I like to step up to his window and toss rubber spiders onto Ben as he sleeps.

  The rubber spiders tickle his face. He wakes up. And starts to scream.

  Every time.

  He always thinks the spiders are real.

  He screams and tries to scramble out of bed. He gets all tangled in his covers and thuds onto the floor.

  Then Stephanie and I congratulate each other on a job well done. And we go home to bed.

  But tonight, as we tossed the rubber spiders at Ben’s sleeping face, Stephanie turned to me and whispered, “I just had a great idea.”

  “Huh?” I started to reply. But Ben’s scream interrupted me.

  We listened to him scream, then thud to the floor.

  Stephanie and I slapped each other a high five. Then we took off, running across the dark backyards, our sneakers thumping the hard, nearly-frozen ground.

  We stopped in front of the split oak tree in my front yard. The tree trunk is completely split in two. But Dad doesn’t have the heart to have the tree taken away.

  “What is your great idea?” I asked Stephanie breathlessly.

  Her dark eyes flashed. “I’ve been thinking. Every time we go out to haunt the neighborhood, we scare the same old kids. It’s starting to get boring.”

  I wasn’t bored. But I knew that once Stephanie gets an idea, there’s no stopping her. “So, do you want to find some new kids to scare?” I asked.

  “No. Not new kids. Something else.” She began to walk around the tree. Circling it. “We need a new challenge.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Our scares are all kid stuff,” she complained. “We make some spooky sound
s, toss a few things inside an open window — and everyone is frightened to death. It’s too easy.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “But it’s funny.”

  She ignored me. She stuck her head through the split in the tree trunk. “Duane, what’s the scariest place in Wheeler Falls?”

  That was easy. “Hill House, of course,” I answered.

  “Right. And what makes it so scary?”

  “All the ghost stories. But especially the one about the boy searching for his head.”

  “Yes!” Stephanie cried. All I could see now was her head, poking through the split oak tree. “The Headless Ghost!” she cried in a deep voice, and let out a long, scary laugh.

  “What’s your problem?” I demanded. “Are you trying to haunt me now?”

  Her head seemed to float in the darkness. “We need to haunt Hill House,” she declared in a whisper.

  “Excuse me?” I cried. “Stephanie, what are you talking about?”

  “We’ll take the Hill House tour and sneak off on our own,” Stephanie replied thoughtfully.

  I shook my head. “Give me a break. Why would we do that?”

  Stephanie’s face seemed to glow, floating by itself in the tree trunk. “We’ll sneak off on our own — to search for the ghost’s head.”

  I stared back at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

  I walked behind the tree and tugged her away from it. The floating head trick was starting to give me the creeps.

  “No, Duane, I’m not kidding,” she replied, shoving me away. “We need a challenge. We need something new. Prowling around the neighborhood, terrifying everyone we know — that’s just kid stuff. Bor-ring.”

  “But you don’t believe the story about the missing head — do you?” I protested. “It’s just a ghost story. We can search and search. But there is no head. It’s all a story they made up for the tourists.”

  Stephanie narrowed her eyes at me. “I think you’re scared, Duane.”

  “Huh? Me?” My voice got pretty shrill.

  A cloud rolled over the moon, making my front yard even darker. A chill ran down my back. I pulled my jacket around me tighter.

  “I’m not afraid to sneak off from the tour and search Hill House on our own,” I told Stephanie. “I just think it’s a big waste of time.”

  “Duane, you’re shivering,” she teased. “Shivering with fright.”