House of a Thousand Screams Read online

  At the bottom of the note was a P.S.

  Jill, I thought you liked your room the way it was. Why did you change it?

  “Huh?” I said, confused.

  “What?” Freddy asked through a mouthful of cupcake.

  I showed him the note. “I didn’t change anything. What’s she talking about?”

  Freddy and I stared at each other. After a moment Freddy said, “Maybe we should find out.”

  We headed up to my room together. I stood at the door, my hand on the knob. My heart was pounding. It wasn’t from climbing the stairs.

  “Aren’t you going in?” Freddy prodded me with his elbow.

  “I’m going.” I gritted my teeth and opened the door.

  I gasped. Everything in my room had been moved! The bed now stood against the opposite wall. The dresser, so heavy that I couldn’t budge it myself, was across the room from where it had been. My posters were all switched around.

  “I didn’t do this, Freddy,” I said.

  My little brother folded his arms. “So I guess it all just slipped out of place, like the books?”

  He would pick that moment to go all superior on me.

  I glared at him. “Don’t get smart,” I warned.

  “Or maybe we have mice,” he suggested sarcastically.

  “That’s enough. Cut it out!” I sat on the bed, got up again, and looked under it, just to make sure nothing was hiding there, then sat on the bed again. “What in the world could have done this?”

  Freddy took a seat beside me. “I think I know,” he told me. “But you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “Look around you!” I waved my hand around my reorganized room. “Don’t you think all this is crazy? I promise I won’t laugh, Freddy. Just tell me your idea.”

  Freddy gnawed his lower lip for a moment, making up his mind. Then he jumped to his feet. “Wait here,” he ordered and ran downstairs.

  He came back up a moment later with a thick book. “I got this from my school library,” he explained.

  I took it from him and read the title aloud: “Bumps in the Night: Real Stories of Hauntings in America.”

  My hands shook. I licked my lips.

  “You mean . . . ” I trailed off. I couldn’t say it.

  Freddy could. He nodded.

  “Yup,” he said. “I think this house is haunted.”

  7

  “Haunted!” I echoed. My hands suddenly felt clammy.

  “Yeah! Everything fits, Jill,” Freddy told me earnestly. He pointed to the book. “I think we’ve got a poltergeist.”

  “A poltergeist?” I repeated. I was starting to feel like a parrot. “What’s that?”

  Freddy hopped onto the bed beside me. “It’s a kind of spirit. Like a ghost. But its specialty is throwing things around.”

  I opened the book and Freddy showed me the section about poltergeists. The stories were a lot like ours. Things flying through the air, loud noises, stuff changed and rearranged.

  “Look, Freddy,” I gasped. “It says this one family lost their house because of a poltergeist. It ran them off!”

  “That’s not the worst. In one house the father disappeared. His kids could hear him in the walls, but they never saw him again!” Freddy pushed his glasses up his nose. His eyes were wide. “What if that happened to Dad? Or to us?”

  I decided there was no point thinking about that. “How do you get rid of them?” I asked. “Do you call a ghostbuster or something?”

  Freddy shook his head. “I don’t know. In most of those stories, it seems like the people just give up and leave. Or go crazy.”

  “Or disappear,” I whispered. My mouth went dry. I felt a strange, tingly fear at the base of my spine. “What are we going to do?”

  “Move,” Freddy declared.

  “We can’t. It would break Mom’s heart! Anyway, how could we possibly convince Mom and Dad to leave this house?”

  “I keep telling you. We have to talk to them! We need to tell them the truth about what’s been going on,” Freddy insisted. “Do you really think they’ll want to live in a house that has a poltergeist?”

  “Do you really think they’ll believe us?” I shot back. “Freddy, haven’t you noticed that none of this stuff ever happens in front of them? Would you believe it if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes?”

  Freddy’s forehead wrinkled as he thought. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “I wonder why? Maybe the poltergeist is trying to make us look bad. Maybe it wants to get us in trouble.”

  That made me mad. I felt my hands curl into fists. “There has to be a way to get rid of this thing,” I muttered. “And whatever that way is, we’re going to find it.”

  “Right!” Freddy agreed.

  Then we both sat there on my bed, staring at the walls. I knew Freddy was thinking the same thing I was.

  We talked tough. But, really, we didn’t have a clue how to get rid of a poltergeist!

  After a moment I stood up. “We can’t just sit around here spooked. We need to do something. Anything.”

  “Let’s do something for Mom,” said Freddy. “She’s been pretty annoyed with us lately. Let’s surprise her.”

  “You want to? What should we do?”

  “Let’s bake her a pie,” Freddy suggested. “You make great pies.”

  I laughed. Freddy was the original pie eater. “Bake Mom a pie, huh?”

  Freddy grinned at me. “Yeah. Cherry.”

  “Which just happens to be your favorite flavor.”

  Freddy made an innocent face. “It’s for Mom. Nothing’s too good for Mom.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “But let’s do it now, before she gets home and tells us no.”

  We ran downstairs, taking three steps at a time.

  “What should I set the oven for?” Freddy called as he ran ahead.

  “Three-fifty. But not so fast, bonehead. Let’s make sure we have cherry pie filling first.”

  Freddy rifled the pantry while I took out a big mixing bowl.

  “Ta-da!” He hurried over with two cans of cherry filling.

  “Okay. You open them while I start the crust.”

  “We’re making two, right?” Freddy demanded, licking his lips.

  I shook my head, smiling. What a pig! “Yeah, sure. We’re making two.”

  While Freddy opened the cans, I measured and sifted the flour. I’d been baking since I was eight years old. Dad claimed I made the best pie crust in the country.

  We laughed and joked as we worked. Freddy brought me a measuring cup of ice water for the crust. I moved the big plastic flour canister over to make room for rolling the pie dough. Then I sprinkled flour across the countertop.

  I was reaching into the canister for a little more, when I heard a bang behind me. I turned, just in time to see all our baking pans falling out of the cupboard.

  “Ow! Ouch!” Freddy hollered. Baking sheets bounced off his head.

  “Clutz,” I called.

  “I didn’t do it!” he protested. “They just came out!”

  My hand was still in the flour container.

  Then something grabbed it. Something in the flour itself!

  Something that held my wrist in a grip of iron!

  8

  I screamed. I couldn’t help it—it just burst out of me.

  Frantic, I pulled against the thing in the canister. But it held on to my hand like a vise. Whatever it was, it had cold claws. I could feel them.

  My heart hammered in my chest. “Let me go!” I yelled.

  Every drawer in the kitchen flew open. Knives, forks, and spoons jangled out of their plastic holders. The mixing bowl flipped over and shattered on the floor.

  “Freddy! Help!” I called frantically.

  But my little brother had his own problems. He dodged a rain of flying plates. Then he slipped in a puddle of cherry pie filling and landed facedown in it.

  Whatever held me squeezed my wrist. Hard. I cried out in pain. Then I put everything I had in
to one big tug.

  The grip suddenly released. The canister leapt off the counter and banged into my forehead.

  “Ow,” I groaned. I fell back in a thick cloud of flour. It covered me, clotting my mouth and nose.

  “Look out!” Freddy shouted from where he lay sprawled.

  I glanced up. The measuring cup floated in midair above me. As I stared at it, it tipped. Ice water poured out.

  “Aaahh!” I yelled. Icy trickles ran over my face and into my ears. The water mixed with the flour and turned my hair into a sticky, doughy mess. As soon as it was empty, the measuring cup dropped to the floor. Its job was done.

  I clambered slowly to my feet. The kitchen was buried beneath a blanket of flour. It looked as if it had been bombed. Which was roughly how I felt.

  “Freddy?” I groaned, then coughed out a chunk of dough. I tried again. “Freddy? Are you all right?”

  His voice was so calm that I could tell he was really scared. “I’ve been better.”

  “Oh, no!” a voice exclaimed behind me.

  I whirled to see Mom standing in the kitchen doorway. She held bags of groceries in both arms. Her mouth hung open in shock.

  There was no sound, no movement while she took it all in. The broken plates and bowls. The spilled silverware. The thick coat of flour everywhere.

  Slowly, Mom set the grocery bags down on the floor. At last she looked at me, and her face kind of twisted up.

  I tried to grin. My lips stuck together a little where the dough and water had made a paste.

  “We—uh, we thought we’d bake you a pie,” was the best I could manage.

  “A pie,” Mom repeated.

  “Cherry,” Freddy piped up from his place on the floor. He scraped some filling off the floor with his finger to show Mom.

  Mom stood there, dazed, for another moment. Then she took a deep breath. “Your father will be home this evening,” she said. “I’ll let him talk to you about this. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Some other time, maybe, I’ll talk to you about it. In a month or so. When I’ve calmed down . . . ”

  Her words trailed off. She turned and sort of hobbled away.

  “We’ll clean it up,” I yelled. But if Mom heard me, she gave no sign.

  Slowly, silently, we started putting things right. Only four dishes had broken, thank goodness. And the mixing bowl.

  The more I worked, the madder I got. What did the poltergeist have against us anyway? What had we ever done to it?

  “Jill?” Freddy asked.

  “Yeah?” I snapped.

  Freddy’s voice was small. “What do we do now?”

  “Now?” I began sweeping the flour into a pile. “Now we finish making the kitchen as good as new.”

  “I meant after that,” Freddy said.

  I knew what he meant. But part of me couldn’t believe what I was about to say. I took a deep breath. “All right. After that we find out where this poltergeist thing is hiding. Then we figure out a way to fix its little wagon.”

  “Are you serious?” Freddy squeaked. “Jill, poltergeists are supernatural. They have powers.”

  Poor Freddy! He looked so scared that I forgot my own fear. I had to make him feel better.

  “So what?” I demanded. “We have powers too!”

  “We do?” Freddy looked doubtful. “Like what?”

  “Well . . .” I thought fast. “Uh—we’re from Texas. It’s like they say back home. Don’t mess with Texas!”

  Freddy was staring at me as if I had sprouted an extra nose.

  I hurried on. “Texans are the roughest, toughest, smartest people around. Right?”

  “If you say so,” Freddy answered, still staring at me.

  But I was starting to get into it. “You bet I do. Remember the Alamo!” I called, and punched my fist into the air.

  “We lost at the Alamo,” Freddy reminded me.

  Oh, yeah, I thought. Well . . .

  “It doesn’t matter,” I argued. “It’s the Alamo spirit that matters. The Texas spirit. Where everything is bigger and better.” I was really worked up by now. “What state’s bigger than Texas?”

  “Alaska.”

  I shook my head. Freddy wasn’t catching my drift. “Alaska doesn’t count.”

  “In fact,” Freddy went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “if you cut Alaska in half and made it two states, Texas would be the third biggest state.”

  “You are getting to be a major drag,” I told him. “The point is, we’re not quitters. Would Sam Houston quit?”

  “No. He wouldn’t.”

  “Would Davy Crockett quit? Would Jim Bowie quit?”

  “They weren’t Texans,” Freddy objected.

  “Okay, forget about them.” I leaned forward. Time to pull out the big guns. “Would the Dallas Cowboys quit?”

  Freddy’s face lit up.

  “The Dallas Cowboys! No way! They would never quit.”

  “And neither will we!” I grinned at my little brother. “Now, come on. We have a lot left to do before we can go hunting for that poltergeist.”

  We tore into the mess with a new spirit. As we cleaned, I thought about our plan of attack.

  If a poltergeist was hiding out in the house, there was only one place it could be. The one place Mom hadn’t gotten around to organizing yet. The one place I’d carefully avoided ever since we moved in.

  The spookiest, scariest room in the house.

  The attic.

  But were we brave enough to go up there?

  9

  Before we did anything, I took a shower. I had to wash all the flour paste out of my hair. It wasn’t easy.

  Then Freddy and I tiptoed past Mom and Dad’s room, where Mom lay, “resting.”

  “Shhh,” I warned.

  We climbed the narrow stairs and stopped at the attic door. Freddy whispered, “What do we do if we find it?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But we have to do something. Maybe we could chase it out a window.”

  “Or spray it with bug spray,” Freddy suggested.

  I nodded. “Whatever it takes. I just can’t handle another day like today.”

  My hair was still wet from the shower. Water dripped down my neck. It reminded me of the disaster in the kitchen. That made me mad all over again. I set my jaw and turned the knob.

  Thick, musty air greeted us as we stepped into the attic. The shutters had slats that sifted the late afternoon sunlight. Tiger stripes of light and shadow lay over mysterious mounds of stuff.

  I stepped forward quickly and pulled the string for the light. A bare bulb flickered on.

  It wasn’t so creepy with the extra light. The room was cluttered with Uncle Solly’s old junk. Boxes lay everywhere. A rocking chair with a broken rail leaned in one corner, more boxes piled on its seat. A dress dummy draped in rotting fabric stood beside it. That must have belonged to Uncle Solly’s wife, I guessed. She died years ago, before I was born.

  “I don’t see any poltergeist,” Freddy said. “Do you?”

  “No,” I admitted. Now that we were there, I felt kind of stupid. What had I expected? That the thing would be sitting at a table playing solitaire?

  Freddy ran a finger along one of the old boxes. “Wow. Uncle Solly sure had a lot of stuff, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “And look at the dust and cobwebs. Nobody’s been up here for a long time.”

  Freddy shifted a box from the top of a stack. He opened the top and looked in.

  “Hey, look at this.” He held up a book. “It’s all about coin magic. And here’s a book by Houdini! Cool! It’s like a library of magic.”

  Freddy loves magic books. He doesn’t have too many of his own because they’re really expensive. So this box was like a treasure chest to him.

  “This is great!” he said, beaming.

  We could be here for a while, I thought. I opened another box. Inside were hundreds of fancy silk scarves. Some were plain. Others had designs that looked like magical symbols.

  We f
ound other things. Boxes filled with plastic thumbs and fingers. Hollow tubes with other tubes hidden inside them. Hats with secret compartments for storing rabbits. Old-fashioned ladies’ bonnets—for what, I couldn’t even guess. Also, Freddy got really excited over something he called an egg bag. I don’t know. It just looked like an ordinary bag to me.

  The attic was like a magician’s museum. The more stuff we took down, the more stuff we found.

  That’s how we found the big tricks, the illusions. There was a kind of brace that Freddy said was used for making people look as if they were floating. He showed me how it worked. But there were some tricks that even he couldn’t figure out.

  “It’s like I said before,” Freddy told me. “I think some of Uncle Solly’s act was real magic. That’s why we can’t make it work.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

  “Hah!” Freddy poked me in the side. “I’m not the one who wanted to come up here and search for a poltergeist.”

  At last we found an old trunk buried under piles of boxes. We dragged it into the clear. Freddy lifted the lid. Inside was a bunch of old magazines. And a wooden box carved with ugly, grinning faces.

  “Hey! That’s the puppet box we saw in Uncle Solly’s video,” I exclaimed.

  I pulled the box from the trunk. It was about a foot long on each side, a perfect cube. And heavy for its size. I shook it. Something thumped inside.

  The box had a broken latch at the top. A piece of wire was twisted through it to keep it closed.

  “Open it,” Freddy suggested.

  I started to untwist the wire. I’d almost gotten it off, when I heard a scraping noise behind me. And then a squeak.

  “What was that?” Freddy whispered. “A rat?”

  “A rat!” The hair rose on the back of my neck. I thought of the tiny footprints I’d found on my dresser top. I didn’t want to turn around. What if the rat was right behind me?

  Just then the puppet box jerked in my hands. “Hey!” I cried.

  “Jill. Look!” Freddy gasped.

  I whipped around.

  There was something right behind me.

  But it wasn’t a rat.