The Horror at Chiller House Read online

  Could the boy do it?

  He suddenly felt terrified. His hands were so sweaty, the crossbow handle felt slippery. He was trembling so hard. He wondered if Father could see him shaking.

  I want him to be proud of me, the boy thought. I want him to like me.

  I really don’t want to fail.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. He tightened both hands. Aimed through the sight.

  He aimed the sleek, deadly arrow at a fat tree trunk across the grass.

  He took another shuddering breath. Squeezed the trigger with all his strength. Fired.

  And as burning pain shot through his body, he opened his mouth in a deafening scream.

  What have I done?

  The pain throbbed … throbbed … blinding pain …

  It faded slowly. And slowly, the boy’s senses began to snap back. His brain started up again.

  He saw the crossbow, still in his hands. No arrow. He had shot the arrow.

  Above him, the trees appeared to tilt and sway. The whole earth was trembling. All a blur.

  His father’s scream snapped him alert: “You shot yourself in the foot! I don’t believe it! You shot your own foot!”

  “Ohhh.” A groan escaped the boy’s throat.

  He glanced down and saw the shaft of the arrow poking straight up through the top of his left shoe. His foot throbbed in pain, and the pain shot up his leg, his whole body.

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it,” Father repeated, shaking his head.

  He started to laugh. He laughed so hard, tears ran down his cheeks.

  Father laughed till he could barely breathe.

  * * *

  Father gave the arrow a hard pull and jerked it from his son’s foot. Bright red blood spurted over the boy’s shoe.

  At home, Mother dabbed the wound with alcohol. She wrapped the foot gently in a long white bandage.

  Father stood against the bathroom wall, watching. He rubbed his stubbled cheeks but didn’t say a word.

  Later, the boy was in his bedroom, lying on his back on the bed. He shut his eyes. He tried to calm down, tried to get his heart to stop racing.

  If only his bandaged foot would stop aching and throbbing.

  He kept picturing the fat turkeys, their heads bobbing as if they were listening to music. And the tall trees spinning, trembling over his head as he tried to balance that crossbow.

  Father’s voice interrupted his thoughts. His parents were in the hall again. They didn’t know their son could hear every word.

  “Okay, you win,” Father said. “Let Jonny stay in his room with his toys and his books.”

  “That’s where he belongs,” Mother replied. The boy could hear the anger in her voice. “He’s a brilliant boy. You had no business taking Jonny hunting with you. No business at all.”

  “Don’t worry,” Father said. “I never will take him again!”

  Those words made Jonny sit straight up. Anger swept over him. Anger so powerful it made him forget his aching, pulsing pain.

  “I’ll show you, Father!” he shouted at the bedroom door. “One day, I’ll show you that I can be a man. One day, you’ll be proud that I am your son!”

  He stomped across the room to his bookshelves. He grabbed up spacemen and cowboys and monsters and soldiers. He gathered them into his arms. Then he lined them all up. One by one, he lined them up on the floor in front of him.

  He went to the closet. He pulled out his red bathrobe. He wrapped the robe around him.

  Then he stepped back to the figures on the floor. His subjects. His loyal subjects.

  He raised his arms in the royal red robe. And he shouted: “I am JONATHAN CHILLER, your king! I am all-powerful. You will obey me. You will all obey me!”

  “Whoa.” I uttered a startled cry.

  White light quivered all around me, so bright I still saw it when I shut my eyes.

  Slowly, the light faded. I blinked a few times. I shook my head. Ran my hand through my blond hair.

  Sometimes you see funny videos of people spinning around inside big clothes dryers. That’s what I thought of. That’s what I felt like.

  Like I’d been spinning endlessly in burning hot air.

  And now the room started to come into focus. I saw cluttered shelves and tall display cases. A grinning skeleton propped against the back door.

  I knew where I was. This was the little souvenir store where I bought that evil dummy, Slappy. I was back in Chiller House. Back in HorrorLand.

  But — how?

  I shook myself hard, as if trying to wake from a dream. Am I going crazy?

  That thought flashed through my spinning brain.

  I reviewed the facts. I had to make everything clear.

  My name. It’s Ray Gordon. I’m twelve. My little brother’s name is Brandon. I shouldn’t call him little brother. He’s twice my size.

  Okay. My memory was fine. My brain wasn’t totally playing jokes on me.

  But one minute I had been at home in my room. And now here I stood, in the aisle of this little shop in HorrorLand.

  And as the bright light faded and my mind cleared, I realized I wasn’t alone. I saw other kids about my age huddled together at the front of the store. I counted them. Five in all. Three boys and two girls.

  They all stared at me, as if they’d been waiting for me. But their faces were filled with surprise.

  I took a few shaky steps toward them. “Are you — are you surprised to be here, too?” I stammered.

  They all began talking at once. I could tell they were as confused as me. Confused and frightened.

  I gazed around. The six of us were alone in the store. Where was Jonathan Chiller, the old guy who owned the place?

  I suddenly remembered. “I held a tiny Horror in my hand,” I said. “It was glowing. Green and yellow light came out of it, and it pulled me …”

  “Me, too,” the girl with curly red hair said.

  “The little Horrors brought us here somehow,” a round-faced boy, built like a middle linebacker, chimed in.

  “Were you all here in this store before?” I asked.

  Everyone nodded and said yes.

  “Did you all take something home from here?” I asked.

  Again, the answer was yes.

  “I picked a joke coin,” the very tall girl with straight brown hair and shiny blue eyes said. “A two-headed coin. It got me in all kinds of trouble.”

  That started everyone talking again.

  “I bought a leather cord with an ancient dog tooth on it,” the big, round-faced boy said.

  “I brought home Insta-Gro Pets that grew gigantic!”

  Everyone had a crazy story. I think I had the craziest of all. Who would believe a wooden ventriloquist’s dummy could come to life?

  As we all shared our stories of horror, I began to catch their names. The middle linebacker with the very worried expression was Andy. The way-tall girl was Jessica. The other girl, the one with red hair, was Meg.

  Marco was the one who talked about comic books and some superhero character named The Ooze. Marco was tall and dark and serious looking.

  The other boy was Sam. He was short and smaller than the rest of us. He had black hair and dark eyes. His two front teeth poked out when he talked, like Bugs Bunny teeth.

  It didn’t take long to put the stories together. All six of us had bought gifts or souvenirs here. All six of us had scary adventures, mostly because of those souvenirs.

  “The old dude, Jonathan Chiller, gave me a little Horror,” Sam said. “He told me to take a little Horror home with me.”

  “Me, too!” several kids cried.

  We all started talking again. It turned out that Chiller didn’t let any of us pay for our gifts. He said we could pay him next time.

  I felt a chill run slowly down my back. I suddenly felt cold all over.

  Is this it? Is this payback time?

  The shelves and cases were jammed with items. Big stuffed monsters had tumbled out into t
he aisle. I saw a headless monkey with a lightbulb where its head should be.

  Grinning, prune-wrinkled shrunken heads dangled on rubber cords from the ceiling. Globs of rubber vomit glistened wetly on a low shelf. One glass case was jammed full with ugly plastic cockroaches.

  The stuff all seemed really funny the first time I was here with my brother. But now it was just frightening.

  “How do we get home?” Meg asked. “My parents must be frantic.”

  “Does anyone have a phone?” I asked.

  Sam pulled a cell phone from his jeans pocket. He peered at the screen. He pushed the power button. He shook the phone.

  Then he let out a sigh. “Totally dead. I don’t get it. I just recharged it before … before I was brought here.”

  No one else had a phone with them. We had all been pulled away from our homes without any warning.

  “Where is Chiller?” I said. “We have a lot of questions for him.”

  I made my way to the back room. The door had a werewolf poster across it. It swung open easily. I poked my head inside.

  A tiny supply room. More shelves of weird stuff. But no sign of the old shop owner.

  We all walked up and down the aisles. He wasn’t hiding anywhere in the store.

  “This is kind of like a comic book story,” Marco said. “You know. Time travel. No, not time travel. But some kind of travel. There was an Ooze story about a bunch of kids who could jump from one place to another.”

  “But this isn’t a comic book,” Meg said, shaking her head. “This is our lives.”

  I stepped behind the front desk. The screen saver was on the computer monitor. It showed skeleton fish swimming in black water.

  I saw a stack of papers in the corner of the desk. I picked them up.

  “Hey. This is disturbing,” I said.

  I held up the stack. They were photographs. I turned them around and shuffled through them. Grainy, blurred black-and-white photos.

  “That’s us!” Sam said. He grabbed some of the photos from my hand and studied them. “Photos taken of each of us in this store.”

  Jessica pointed up to the ceiling. We all saw the small black security camera up there. It was aimed down at the front desk.

  “Chiller took our picture when we stood here,” Sam said.

  I took the photos back from him. My picture was on the top. I gazed at it — and felt a chill.

  “Look,” I said. I held it up so everyone could see it. “Someone has added something to it.”

  Yes. Someone had taken a black marker. They drew an arrow through my head.

  I shuffled through the stack. Jessica’s picture had an arrow drawn through her head, too. And Meg’s. And Andy’s.

  “All of them,” I said. “Did Chiller do this? Someone very carefully drew an arrow through our heads.”

  “Creepy,” Andy muttered. “What does it mean? Is it some kind of sick threat?”

  I heard a loud cough. We all turned toward the front door.

  Jonathan Chiller stood in the doorway. Blue light from the front window poured over him, making him look ghostlike.

  “Welcome back,” he said, and a cold smile spread slowly over his face.

  Chiller stood in the eerie blue light, hands in the pockets of his old-fashioned vest. The light gleamed off his square eyeglasses perched on the end of his long nose.

  His thinning hair was tied behind his head. His ruffled shirt and high-collared suit looked like they came from a museum. He reminded me of Ben Franklin, or maybe the old guy on the oatmeal box.

  We didn’t wait for him to come closer. We rushed toward him, bombarding him with questions.

  “Why did you bring us back here?”

  “Why did you take our pictures?”

  “What do you want? How could you do this?”

  “Why did you draw arrows through our heads? Have you kidnapped us?”

  “Send us back home — now!”

  His smile didn’t fade as we pushed up close. His tiny eyes flashed behind the square glasses. He waved his hands to quiet us down.

  “So glad to see you all back in my shop,” he said in his croaky old voice. He rubbed his hands together. “Now my game can begin.”

  “Game?” I cried. “What kind of game?”

  He stepped forward, his big stomach leading the way. He left the blue light behind him. The skin on his face was pale and flabby. His boots trod heavily on the wood floor.

  He took the little Horror from my hand. I didn’t realize I was still holding it.

  “Now, I believe I have collected all your little Horrors,” he said. He tossed the Horror into a trash basket under the front counter. “Those old ones are worthless. They can’t be reused.”

  “Are you going to send us home?” Jessica demanded. She had a big, angry voice. Her blue eyes locked on Chiller.

  “Of course I’ll send you home,” Chiller said softly. The thin smile returned to his face. “After we play our game.”

  “You brought us all back here to play a game?” I demanded.

  He took the stack of photographs and straightened them. “Do you remember your first visits here?” he asked. “You all bought souvenirs? Jessica, you bought that two-headed coin? Sam, you bought the Insta-Gro Pets?”

  “Yes, we remember,” Jessica said, rolling her eyes. “What about them?”

  Chiller set the photographs down in a perfectly straight pile. He gazed from one face to the next. “Maybe you also remember that you didn’t pay for your gifts?”

  We all muttered replies.

  His smile revealed a gleaming gold tooth. “Guess what, kids. It’s payback time.”

  “You — you planned this all along?” I stammered. “From our first visit here. You deliberately didn’t let us pay — because you knew you were going to bring us back here?”

  He ignored my question. He clasped his pale hands together. “I love games — don’t you?” he said. “I don’t know why you are so angry. I think you’ll enjoy my game. I think you’ll find it … challenging.”

  Silence for a moment.

  I guess we were all thinking hard about what he was saying.

  Finally, Jessica spoke up. “What if we don’t want to play?”

  Chiller’s smile faded. His expression grew cold. “You do want to go home again — don’t you?”

  I felt a wave of fear sweep over me. I took a step back from the front counter.

  Chiller wasn’t smiling that sick smile anymore. His eyes grew icy behind the old glasses. He grasped the end of the counter with both hands and studied us.

  “Now, get those worried looks off your faces,” he said. “I’m sure you will be very successful at my game. I know you will all be winners.”

  “And go home?” Sam asked.

  Chiller nodded. “Yes. Winners go home.”

  What does THAT mean? Does he mean ONLY winners go home?

  He reached under the counter and pulled out a small red chest. He lifted the lid and pulled out a little green-and-purple Horror doll. It looked exactly like the big Horrors who work in the park in all the shops and restaurants, run the games and rides, and act as guides.

  “You all took a little Horror home with you,” he said. “Now you will need to find one of these Horrors to take you back home.”

  “Why are you talking in riddles?” I asked. “What do you want us to do?”

  Chiller studied the little Horror doll. “I love riddles — don’t you?” he asked. He thumped the countertop with his fingers. “Here’s a riddle for you. See if you can get it. What did the spider say to the fly?”

  We all stared at him in silence.

  Did he really steal us from our homes, transport us here against our will to ask us riddles?

  “What did the spider say to the fly?” Chiller repeated. “Anyone?”

  No one spoke.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. The spider didn’t say anything to the fly. The spider bit the fly’s head off!”

  Chiller tossed back his head
and laughed like a maniac. He thumped the counter with both hands and laughed till tears ran down his sagging cheeks.

  Marco leaned close to me. “He’s totally nuts,” he whispered.

  I nodded.

  Yes. Chiller seemed to be totally nuts. And we were trapped here with him.

  He finally stopped laughing. He pulled a lacy handkerchief from his pants pocket, wiped his wet cheeks, then blew his nose loudly. As he tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket, his expression turned serious.

  “Let me explain my little scavenger hunt,” he said. “It’s quite simple. I’ve hidden six of these little Horrors around HorrorLand. One for each of you. They are just like the Horrors that brought you here. I placed them inside six little treasure chests like this one. You see —”

  “This is a huge park,” Jessica interrupted, tossing back her long brown hair. “How are we supposed to find tiny chests —”

  “Look at it. It’s bright red,” Chiller said. “How easy is that? When you find a chest, take out the little Horror. Squeeze it between your hands, and it will take you home.”

  Andy shook his head, frowning unhappily. “What if we don’t play your game? You have to send us home. You can’t keep us here.”

  Chiller peered at him through the small eyeglasses. “I think you should play the game, Andy. Your parents don’t know you are here. No one knows where you are. The quickest way to get home is to find one of the Horrors.”

  I turned and gazed out the glass front door. I saw dozens of people crossing Zombie Plaza, the main square of HorrorLand. The shops and restaurants were clearing out. It was almost closing time. People were heading to the exit gate.

  “This park covers acres and acres,” I said. “No way can we find six little chests here. It’s impossible.”

  Chiller reached across the counter and patted my shoulder. “I don’t want my game to be too hard. How much fun is that? I’m going to give you some help, Ray.”

  He reached under the counter and pulled out a stack of cards. They looked like trading cards. I saw strange faces on them.

  “Here. Take a card,” he said.