Little Camp of Horrors Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter - 1

  Chapter - 2

  Chapter - 3

  Chapter - 4

  Chapter - 5

  Chapter - 6

  Chapter - 7

  Chapter - 8

  Chapter - 9

  Chapter - 10

  Chapter - 11

  Chapter - 12

  Chapter - 13

  Chapter - 14

  Chapter - 15

  Chapter - 16

  Chapter - 17

  Chapter - 18

  Chapter - 19

  Chapter - 20

  Chapter - 21

  Chapter - 22

  Chapter - 23

  Chapter - 24

  Chapter - 25

  Chapter - 26

  Chapter - 27

  Chapter - 28

  Chapter - 29

  Chapter - 30

  Chapter - 31

  Chapter - 32

  Chapter - 33

  Chapter - 34

  Chapter - 35

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Experience all the chills of the Mostly Ghostly series!

  Mostly Ghostly #1: Who Let the Ghosts Out?

  Mostly Ghostly #2: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend?

  Mostly Ghostly #3: One Night in Doom House

  Mostly Ghostly #4: Little Camp of Horrors

  AND COMING SOON:

  Mostly Ghostly #5: Ghouls Gone Wild

  1

  Nice letter home from camp, right?

  Well, if you think it's for real, you're majorly crazy. It's a joke. No way would yours truly, Max Doyle, write a letter like that.

  For one thing, I hate summer camp. Why go a hundred miles away? You can get mosquito bites in your own backyard! Being outside all day could give you sunburn or sun poisoning or sunstroke— or something even worse.

  For another thing, my parents sent me to Camp Snake Lake. One of the scariest places on earth. A pit of horrors—no kidding. I mean, what does the name tell you? Camp Snake Lake. Does that sound like Camp Smiley Face?

  My other problem is that I'm haunted.

  I'm haunted by Nicky and Tara Roland, two ghosts who used to live in my house. I'm the only one who can see and hear them. They're all alone, and they need me to help find their parents.

  It's all their fault that I had to go to Camp Snake Lake.

  I would have stayed home all summer. I never would have gone away—if it wasn't for them.

  I never would have faced the horde of evil ghosts, those ugly, terrifying ghosts. I never would have taken the plunge—into Snake Lake.

  And three guesses why they call it that?

  Well, believe me, I never wrote any sweet letters home from camp. I didn't have time.

  The only letters I wrote were “S.O.S.” Help!!!

  2

  IT ALL STARTED IN JULY. My brother Colin was in his room, packing his trunk for camp. He's a big shot junior counselor at Camp Snake Lake.

  He loves it there.

  What does Colin love about summer camp? Well, he enjoys dunking kids' heads underwater. And scaring the little campers with ghost stories. Tossing kids out of canoes and telling them there's a man-eating crocodile in the water. Hiding dead beetles in the potato salad. Fun things like that.

  Colin is big and blond, good-looking and athletic, smart and popular.

  In other words, he's a total jerk.

  At least, that's my opinion.

  I'm not like my older brother. I told my parents I wouldn't go to camp. I said I wanted to stay home, hang out with my friend Aaron, and have fun on my own.

  I wanted to practice my magic act. I have a whole bunch of new tricks I want to learn. And I've gotten into word games in a major way.

  I do all the puzzle books with word searches and anagrams. Do you know what an anagram is? It's when you take a word or a name and switch all the letters around to make new words.

  For example, do you know an anagram for my name—Max E. Doyle?

  It's YODEL EXAM.

  And do you know an anagram for Bob?

  It's BOB. Ha ha!

  Aaron and I are also building our own Web site. We don't know what it's about yet. But we know it's going to be totally cool.

  So there's plenty to do around home. That's what I told my parents. Mom said I need more fresh air. She said I need to build my body by playing sports.

  Dad called me a spineless wimp. He's big as a truck and tough, and he always talks like that. I'm used to it. He thinks he can encourage me by calling me a lot of names.

  I told him that an anagram for spineless is SLIPS SEEN. He just stared at me like I was crazy.

  So now they were in Colin's room helping him pack. And I was in my room down the hall, practicing some card tricks. And a voice behind me said, “Hey, Max. What's up?”

  Startled, I dropped the deck of cards all over the floor. I turned and saw Nicky and Tara standing behind me.

  They're both tall and thin and have dark hair and gray-green eyes. Nicky is my age—eleven. He wore a black T-shirt and shorts. Tara is nine. She wore a blue sleeveless top over faded low-rise jeans. Red plastic earrings dangled from her ears.

  “Why did you sneak up on me like that?” I demanded.

  “We're ghosts,” Tara said. “We can't help it.”

  “Can we search one more time?” Nicky asked, peeking under my bed.

  “What for?” I said. “We've been searching for months. We've torn this room upside down. The pendant isn't here.”

  Tara sighed. “We can't give up, Max. We have to keep looking everywhere. If Mom and Dad are inside that pendant … ” Her voice broke.

  Nicky dropped to his stomach and crawled under the bed. “I don't see it,” he said.

  “Nicky, we've searched every dust ball,” I said.

  “Maybe there are some new dust balls we haven't searched,” Nicky replied.

  Tara opened my closet door and began tossing all the junk out of my closet. “That pendant is close by,” she said. “I just have a feeling.”

  I'd better explain.

  When my family moved into this house, it was empty. On the floor in my bedroom, Mom found a silver, bullet-shaped pendant. She put it on a chain and told me to wear it around my neck for good luck.

  A few months ago, the ghosts and I learned that the pendant is actually a life pod. Ghosts can live inside it. Nicky and Tara believe their mom and dad are trapped inside the pendant I wear. And maybe we could let them out.

  There's only one little problem. I'm not wearing the pendant. It's lost. It's been lost for months.

  Where did it go? I don't have a clue.

  But of course Nicky and Tara are desperate to find it. They need to find their parents. You see, they don't know what happened to all of them. When they turned up at my house last October, Nicky and Tara couldn't remember how they became mostly ghostly.

  I feel so bad for them. One minute they were normal kids. The next minute they were ghosts. No place to live. No parents.

  And to make matters worse, an evil ghost showed up. A terrifying ghost named Phears. He wanted to capture Nicky and Tara—and their parents. He still does.

  I know Phears is out there somewhere. We have to find Nicky and Tara's parents before he does. And that's why we keep searching for the life pod.

  We've torn apart every room in the house— even Colin's room when he was away at a track meet.

  No luck.

  I think it's lost for good. But they won't give up. “Help me, Max,” Nicky called. We tilted back my couch and looked underneath it. I saw two dimes and a quarter under there, but no pendant.

  Tara had finished searching the closet. Now she moved
to my bed. “Maybe it's caught between the mattress and the headboard,” she said.

  She grabbed the pillows and started to heave them off the bed.

  “Max!” I heard Mom cry. She stepped into the doorway just as Tara tossed the pillows.

  Mom saw my pillows appear to fly into the air by themselves.

  “Max!” she cried, pressing her hands to her face. “What is going on?”

  3

  I HAD TO THINK FAST. “Uh … I'm practicing for a pillow fight with Colin,” I said.

  “But those pillows—they were flying by themselves!” Mom cried.

  “Of course,” I said. “They're feather pillows.”

  I know. It didn't make any sense. But Mom didn't want to talk about pillows.

  She stepped over the clutter on the floor. “Max, please change your mind,” she said. “Go to summer camp with Colin. He's leaving in a few minutes with the other junior counselors. Let me pack you up.”

  “No way,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I told you. I'm allergic to trees. I can't help it. Even if I see a tree in a movie, I break out in spots.”

  “That can't be true,” Colin said, bursting into my room. “Because you were born in a tree!”

  Dad came in right behind him. He laughed at Colin's stupid joke.

  “At least I was born, not dredged from a swamp,” I said to Colin.

  No one laughed at that.

  No one ever laughs at my jokes.

  Mom brushed a hand through my hair. “You don't have to go with Colin. You can take the bus tomorrow with the regular campers.”

  “Forget it,” I muttered. “I can't go to camp. Fresh air makes me cough.”

  Dad shook his head and scowled at me. “How do you plan to spend your summer, Max? Doing stupid card tricks in your bedroom?”

  I picked up a deck of cards from my bed table. “Here. Pick a card, any card.”

  Colin grabbed a puzzle magazine and flipped through it. “Check this out. One Hundred and One Anagrams. And he's worked them all.”

  He pinched my cheek really hard. “Like to waste time, Maxie?”

  I grabbed the magazine out of his hand. “Know what an anagram of Colin is?” I asked. “It's stupid.”

  “Please don't fight,” Mom said. She said that at least a hundred times a day. Mom is tiny like a little bird, with a quiet little voice, and she doesn't like yelling.

  Dad took the deck of cards from me. “You have to get over your fears, Max,” he said. “Summer camp will help you.”

  “I'm not afraid,” I replied. “I just don't want to go!”

  “Colin will be there to protect you,” Mom said.

  “Yeah, you got that right.” Colin grinned at me. “Know what I'll protect you from? I'll protect you from gut punches. Like this!”

  He punched me so hard in the stomach, I thought his hand went out my back! I doubled over, holding my aching gut, groaning like a dying seal.

  Mom hurried over to me. “Colin, why did you do that to Maxie?” she asked.

  Colin grinned again. “For fun?”

  “Unnnnk unnnk,” I moaned.

  Colin turned to Dad. “I know why Max won't come to my camp. He's afraid he might have to swim in Snake Lake. I told him how it's filled with deadly poisonous snakes.”

  “That would toughen him up,” Dad said.

  “No one has ever come out of Snake Lake alive,” Colin said, lowering his voice and trying to sound scary.

  I shuddered. I guess he did sound scary.

  “And get this,” Colin said to Dad. “When I told Max the story of the Headless Camper, he almost wet his pants.”

  Dad and Colin both hee-hawed.

  “You're a liar!” I cried.

  “Stop scaring Maxie with those awful camp stories,” Mom scolded.

  “It doesn't matter,” I said. “I'm not going. No way.”

  We heard a horn honk out on the street.

  “The bus!” Colin cried. “It's here!”

  Dad and I grabbed Colin's bags. Then we all hurried downstairs to load him onto the bus. I suddenly felt very happy. A whole summer without Colin! Now, that's a vacation!

  The bus driver came out to help with the bags. Inside the small yellow school bus, three or four other guys about Colin's age stared out at us. The bus said CAMP NAKE AKE on the side. Someone had pulled off some of the letters.

  Mom hugged Colin. Dad hugged him too. Then he and Dad touched knuckles.

  Colin started to climb onto the bus. Halfway up the steps, he turned to me. He pulled something out from under his Camp Snake Lake T-shirt.

  It glittered in the sunlight.

  The pendant!

  Colin was wearing the pendant!

  “Hey, Max—check out my new good-luck pendant!” he called, a big grin on his face.

  “But that's mine!” I shouted.

  “I'm tossing it to the snakes in Snake Lake! See ya!”

  He disappeared into the bus, and it roared away.

  4

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, I sat on the edge of my bed, feeling glum. Nicky and Tara and I spent months searching for that pendant. And stupid Colin had it the whole time.

  How could I tell my two ghost friends the bad news?

  The house was silent. Mom and Dad had gone to a movie. I think they were seeing Scream and Die 3.

  They both love totally violent movies with fighting and killing, and people thrown through plate glass windows, and guys screaming and dying hideous deaths every minute. Mom likes them even more than Dad. Go figure.

  Well, I felt pretty violent myself. I wanted to strangle my brother.

  But Colin was gone. Gone for eight long weeks. And we had to get that pendant.

  “Nicky? Tara? Where are you?” I called, glancing around my room.

  No answer.

  They had disappeared when Mom burst into my room.

  “Hey, guys? Are you here? I need to tell you something.”

  No reply.

  I climbed to my feet and started to pace back and forth. I had to calm down and stop feeling so angry. But how?

  I called Aaron's house. His mother answered and said Aaron wasn't allowed to come to the phone. He was grounded because he'd played a joke on his little sister.

  Aaron had told his sister he had barfed in her bed. It was only potato salad. But when she saw the yellow pile on her blanket, she freaked and puked all over the floor.

  “Aaron can come to the phone in about a month,” his mom said.

  I clicked off the phone and started pacing again. Then I picked up the deck of cards and shuffled it for a while. I practiced shuffling up and shuffling down. The trick is to keep the same five cards on top no matter how many times you shuffle the deck.

  I'm getting pretty good at it. But shuffling cards didn't take my mind off Colin and the pendant.

  “Nicky? Tara?” I called. “Where are you?”

  The doorbell rang.

  I jumped. I could hear my dog, Buster—our huge furry wolfhound—barking his head off in the garage. Doorbells drive him crazy. I don't have a clue why.

  The front door was open. I saw a man and a woman through the screen door. I blinked. Why did they look familiar?

  The man was tall and thin and had wavy brown hair, thinning in front. He had serious brown eyes and a nice smile. He wore a white polo shirt over baggy khakis.

  The woman had lighter hair, cut short and straight. Her eyes were blue. They kept darting from side to side. She didn't smile. Instead, she was chewing the pink lipstick off her lips.

  She wore a pale pink top over a flowered skirt with lots of pleats.

  The man stared at me through the screen door. “I'm sorry to bother you,” he said. “We're the Rolands. We used to live in your house. And we're searching for our two kids, Nicky and Tara.”

  5

  “HUH?”

  I could feel my eyes popping out of my head. My knees buckled, and I staggered back against the wall.

  “You—you—” I stru
ggled to form words.

  Nicky and Tara's parents! They were here! They weren't trapped inside the pendant after all.

  Of course I recognized them. I had stared at Nicky and Tara's framed snapshot of their parents a hundred times.

  And now they stared tensely through the screen door at me. Mrs. Roland held tightly to her husband's arm.

  “They're here,” I finally managed to say. “Nicky and Tara. I mean, I know them. I mean, they're here!”

  I could barely hear my voice over the pounding of my heart. I felt so happy and excited, I wanted to scream.

  “Oh, thank goodness!” Mrs. Roland cried. Tears rolled down her pink cheeks. She gripped Mr. Roland's arm harder, squeezing it tightly.

  They both let out long sighs.

  “C-come in,” I stammered. I pushed open the screen door so they could step inside.

  They glanced around. “Everything is so … different,” Mrs. Roland said. Her voice trembled. “So many memories.”

  They walked into the living room, holding on to each other. “Yes, it's all so different,” Mr. Roland agreed, shaking his head.

  “I'll try to find Nicky and Tara,” I said. “They won't believe you're finally here.”

  “It's taken us so long,” Mrs. Roland said. She turned her head. I guess she didn't want me to see her cry.

  “They've been searching for you this whole time,” I told the Rolands. “I … I helped too. But … ”

  “Are they here? Where are they?” Mr. Roland asked.

  “Upstairs, I think,” I said. “Please … sit down.”

  My legs were shaky as I pulled myself up to my room. “Nicky? Tara? You've got to appear!” I screamed. “Where are you? Please—where are you?”

  I felt a whoosh of cold air—and Nicky and Tara popped up in front of me.

  “Max? What's wrong?” Tara asked.

  “Nothing is wrong!” I cried happily. “They're here. Your parents! They're downstairs!” I was jumping up and down with excitement.

  Nicky and Tara flickered in and out of view. Their faces filled with shock, then joy. I could see that their excitement was making them appear, bright and solid, and then fade and disappear like fireflies at night.

  Finally, Tara grabbed my arm. “You're not joking? Mom and Dad—they're really downstairs?”